The outsiders include Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate who made an unsuccessful bid last year for the Warner Music Group, and the media mogul Robert F. X. Sillerman, according to people involved in investment talks who declined to be identified discussing private agreements.

Mr. Sillerman — who transformed the concert industry in the 1990s by consolidating regional rock promoters into what is now Live Nation — declined to comment for this article, as did a representative of Mr. Burkle.

For new investors, getting into the dance business may not all be a party. Determining the value of the promoting companies is difficult, and there are particular risks whenever putting on a musical bacchanal for tens of thousands.

At the Electric Daisy Carnival in Los Angeles two years ago, a 15-year-old girl died of a drug overdose; at the same event in Dallas the next year, a 19-year-old man died and more than two dozen were hospitalized for drugs, alcohol and heat-related illnesses.

Pasquale Rotella, the chief executive of Insomniac, the company behind those raves, has also been implicated in a corruption scandal in Los Angeles. Last month, he and five others were indicted on charges related to the embezzlement of $2.5 million from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. In a statement, his company maintained that the charges against him were “completely baseless and flat-out wrong, both on the law and on the facts.”

The investment talks may be only in the exploratory phase. But for a musical genre that not long ago was mostly associated with secret locations and drugs, it is a startling development, as are the amounts of money involved. According to the people involved in the talks, offers to buy the biggest promoters have ranged from about $20 million to $60 million.

“It feels like the dot-com era,” said Joel Zimmerman, an agent at William Morris Endeavor who books many of the top dance acts. “There’s a little bit of a gold rush going on, with outsiders looking in.”