The evening, called Trick or Beats, was 18 and older, with green bracelets designating the alcohol-ready. It was one of two sold-out evenings in New York heralding Kaskade’s seventh studio album, “Fire & Ice,” which came out Tuesday. The iTunes release, two weeks earlier, made its debut at No. 4 on the United States overall album chart, behind Coldplay, Kelly Clarkson and Michael Bublé.

Such an incursion might have been unthinkable only a few years ago. But Kaskade, who was voted America’s best D.J. for 2011 by D.J. Times and Pioneer D.J., is at the crest of a transformative wave of electronic music acts, alongside megastar D.J.’s like Deadmau5, who headlined Lollapalooza in August, and Skrillex, the 23-year-old dubstep wunderkind, who collaborated with Kaskade on the new track “Lick It.”

Electronic music, of course, is as old as the VCR, and its European torchbearers, including the D.J.’s David Guetta and Tiesto, have long enjoyed its mass appeal. But only recently has electronic dance music, or E.D.M. as fans call it, swept North America. Some 230,000 people flocked to this year’s Electric Daisy Carnival, the mammoth electronic-music festival. This summer, Kaskade headlined the inaugural IDentity Festival, a 20-city tour that played to tens of thousands in amphitheaters.

In a testament to their commanding new reach, D.J.’s like Kaskade can earn $200,000 or more for a single night, according to handlers and public records. “In the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was an initial explosion of E.D.M. for a quick second,” said Joel Zimmerman, who created William Morris Endeavor’s electronic-music division in 2008 and works with artists like Kaskade, Deadmau5 and Afrojack. “The thing that really flipped the script was social media. You had kids getting connected in a different way.”

Kaskade himself (let us now call him by his given name, Ryan Raddon) remembers the moment he realized that his chosen genre was no longer an underground phenomenon. It was 2009, and he was playing the main stage at the Electric Daisy Carnival, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.