The dance music timeline covers six decades of genre emergence, key recordings, and cultural moments from 1965 to the present. Funk and disco lay the foundation. House and techno build on it in the 1980s. The 1990s produce more genuinely novel subgenres in a single decade than any period before or since. The 2000s see the culture industrialize. The 2010s see it globalize. The 2020s are still in progress.
This section is being rebuilt as a series of editorial posts, organized by decade and genre family. Each post covers the key moments, the recordings, the artists, and the cultural context. The full archive lives in the Genres & History section.