The only thing the media loves more than a success story is a spectacular fall, and thus the death knell for EDM has been ringing louder and louder in recent months.

"Vegas turns up nose at superstar DJs," Page Six reported in late March. A week before that, the Miami Herald noted, "On eve of Ultra Music Festival, the dance-music craze is slowing down." And after Miami Music Week, the unofficial party crawl accompanying Ultra, two Beatport editors noted, "Half-empty pool parties, quiet streets in Miami Beach, short lines, and a relative availability of cabs and car services all told the same tale": "MMW was dead."

Predictions of EDM's imminent demise are hardly new. Way back in September 2013, The Quietus asked if the EDM "bubble" was about to burst, and the same question kept cropping up again and again throughout 2014 and 2015, on blogs like Death and Taxes as well as mainstream outlets like Forbes—which had, ironically, done as much as any mainstream outlet to blow up the EDM bubble in the first place, via its power-ranking guesstimations of just how much scrilla Skrillex and his ilk were actually pulling down.

Time and again, the story was the same: The festival industry was bloated and top-heavy. DJs were paid too much. A former subculture was being inflated into a mass-market fad, and—as with "electronica" and disco before—a market correction was in store.

Ever since Robert F.X. Sillerman's company SFX Entertainment—a media conglomerate encompassing festival promoters like ID&T and Made Event, the marketing agency Fame House, and the digital music store Beatport, among other companies—began its rapid slide toward bankruptcy in early 2016, industry watchers have been waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. (Full disclosure: I worked part-time for Beatport from 2010 to 2012.) Just as SFX's fall is, in many ways, a classic tale of hubris, EDM's '10s explosion could be perceived as one that’s synonymous with overreach. That might be one reason why the recent news of Avicii’s retirement from touring was treated not just as one individual's struggles with stress, overwork, substance abuse, and poor health, but rather as the end of an era.

Of course, the death of EDM doesn't mean the death of dance music, and it doesn't even herald the end of mass-market dance music. Dance and electronic music comprise vast, overlapping ecosystems divided by taste, age, class, and geography; most of those systems have coexisted in one form or another for decades, and they will continue to do so.

But EDM—the hype-fueled, glowstick-twirling meeting of Southern California rave culture, Vegas bombast, youthful hedonism, and corporations eager to cash in—was always an unsustainable proposition. Like capitalism, it was predicated on limitless growth—ever bigger main stages, ever fatter paychecks for the DJs, ever brighter sparklers jutting from the jeroboams in the VIP section. But as everyone knows, that shit can't go on forever. The bursting of the EDM bubble was a foregone conclusion. Here's a timeline of events leading up to it.

December 2011: According to Google Trends, peak dubstep is reached.

December 2011: Skrillex posts Aphex Twin's "Flim" to his Facebook page. The peanut gallery, unimpressed, asks, "Where's the drop?" "Where's the drop" will go on to become an ironic catchphrase almost as annoying as the phenomenon it purports to lampoon.

February 2012: Skrillex peaks.

May 2012: Nestlé's Willy Wonka brand commissions an original dubstep song for a Nerds commercial.

June 2012: Robert F.X. Sillerman—the media mogul who, in the '90s, consolidated dozens of regional promoters into the concert behemoth Live Nation, before selling the company to Clear Channel for $4.4 billion—announces his intention to spend $1 billion buying up companies related to EDM events and culture. "Disco Donnie" Estopinal's Louisiana-based Disco Productions is his first major acquisition.