But take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the tracks and artists you mentioned, and see how high they went in the US vs European charts (to be fair, I was surprised that the Prodigy did so well in the US)
My claim is that the degree to which a genre becomes mainstream in a location is a good reflection of this place being "ground zero" for it.
The point is that mass consumption of dance music was a huge thing in North America.
I mean it's funny. In the early 90s I went to visit my extended family in Germany. At that point I was already a major techno fan, but the funny thing is that when I went to Europe all my cousins, the music they listened to was mostly American R&B and hip-hop. Watching overdubbed episodes of Family Matters. Huge consumers of a side of North American culture that I did not. So to me the demographic situation is more complicated.
I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here. That and most people here are quite young.
Kinda like the American perception on European's techno culture.
Hint: when the clubs released their yearly compilation based on 3 or 4 CD's, you had one disc per genre: Techno, trance, house and progressive/sung. So in the end we listened to all of the EDM offer inbetween depending on the mood.
Also, as I said, dance megamix CD's in Spain could be found as early as late 80's. Ok, more like vinyls, but the concept stays.
I don't have much to add to this apart from to say I think you're both right to varying degrees.
But more importantly I'm enjoying this passionate discourse on HN about a genre of music that I care deeply about.
I think it's fair to say that dance music today wouldn't exist without the breadth of innovation that happened on both sides of "the pond" in recent decades - and to not be too European/US centric - elsewhere around the world too.
Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later.
I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generational horizon thing here, where EDM was the re-emergence of the mainstream top-40 "rave" thing 10 years later for the next generation.
But I remember 3 waves of this stuff:
very early 90s, late 80s, crap like C&C music factory, etc. was the mainstreamization of house music. "pump up the volume" KLF "What Time is Love" etc. was chart topping mainstreamization of acid house, hell it got played all the time on the jukebox in my smalltown / rural Canadian high school. I worked an indoor mall amusement park and the early 90s equivalent of today's EDM was on constant rotation. Dance megamixes, etc.
mid-late 90s, "Electronica"; Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Underworld, etc. were big. And then the tail end of that it just was everywhere.
And then later, this EDM thing.
So 10 year waves, and at no point has it really been foreign to North America. There were huge several thousand person raves all through the late 90s. It's just that in _context_ of hip-hop R&B dominance in North America and its exports, maybe it looks to Europeans as non-existent.