Snobs Email To Pasquale Rotella

Mr. Rotella,

I think that first and foremost, I owe you an apology. When I wrote my EDC article, my information was not entirely accurate. I had sincere and credible (but nonetheless mistaken) sources and as a result I got a lot of details wrong. I would like to apologize for any negative publicity this has gotten you or your company, and I feel terrible that it happened.

It has recently come to my attention that you were essentially told to ignore me, because responding to me just makes me more popular. I want to assure you that I am not your enemy. I want to see you succeed and grow, I want to see EDM become more popular. The main point of my blog is merely that we should be careful to embrace what makes EDM special as it gains more listeners. I actually think that your company does the best job out of anyone worldwide at keeping the magic alive.

My blog fulfills a very important mission. It gives a counterbalancing force and creates needed conflict. As any of your marketing people can tell you, people respond much better when making purchases when there is some clash or complexity of options or decisions. Until my blog, EDM was only getting positive promotion. Everything was either irrational hating or people talking about how great the popularity of EDM is. By presenting the other side of the argument reasonably, I am making the whole thing so much more real for people.

Think about pro-wrestling. If it was just an athletic event where people had great sportsmanship, shook hands, and had a ton of respect, NO ONE would watch. It would be boring. What makes people really love it is the depth of conflict, the silly plot lines, the drama. Do they think the people really hate each other? Probably not. They know it’s pretend. But even superficial conflict can be engaging and interesting, and allows fans to really get into it. This is what my blog provides.

If the trend of constant positivity continued, eventually you’d be seeing “independent” festivals spring up that “keep it real” and “preserve the culture”, and you’d have a real underground movement to contend with. What I’m doing is making it possible to preemptively make that sentiment ineffective to rally people away from companies like yours. Imagine if festivals had an EDMsnob stage (Disclaimer: I’m not asking for a job or proposing a business idea, I do not want or need anything from you, I’m just speaking as a potential friend) that booked the purist acts like Sasha, Digweed, Danny Tenaglia, The Crystal Method, etc. You would automatically have something that is very low cost that you could use to destroy any accusation of mainstreaming or diluting the history and culture of EDM. This is just one example of the vision I have for many, many ways that my important niche is going to fit into EDM’s landscape in the future.

So I am not against you in any way, in fact I think that I am helping you. I am a responsible, rational person that has ethical and journalistic principles that keep me from just making up rumors for publicity. Consider yourself lucky that someone else didn’t pick up this flag before I did.

I hope that we can have a meaningful relationship in the future and I hope you’re willing to open a dialogue. If not, well, I tried. Either way, please respond to this email so that I know you read it. Even an empty response is fine. Otherwise I’ll assume you just didn’t see it and I’ll have to resort to more…creative ways to get you this message.

Sincerely,

The Snob