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Music

Jean Michel Jarre Reflects on His Life as One of Electronic Music's First Superstars

Think EDC is huge? The French electronic pioneer once played for 3.5 million fans.

Everybody likes to talk about how huge EDM has gotten, but you'd have to take the single day attendance at EDC Las Vegas (134,000) and multiply 26 times to reach the 3.5 million folks who witnessed Jean Michel Jarre's 1997 concert in Moscow. The event marked the fourth time Jarre broke his own world record for largest outdoor concert attendance, and capped off a career that began during the infancy of electronic music of the 1960s.

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"Electronic music is not born with Avicii," he says of EDM's current dominance of the cultural conversation on the latest episode of Rave Curious Podcast. Jarre reveals the thoughtful foundation that propelled him to reach the absolute heights of fame, from his early years helping to invent the very idea of synthetically produced music as part of Paris' musique concrete community, to his current undertaking of two albums, Electronica and Electronica 2, that see the legend collaborating with artists as diverse as Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Mills.

Listen to Rave Curious Podcast 016 - Jean Michel Jarre

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