[1] Electronica artists that would later become commercially successful began to record in the late 1980s, before the term had come into common usage, including for example the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, the Chemical Brothers, the Crystal Method, Moby, Underworld and Faithless.
[7] Around the mid-1990s, with the success of the big beat-sound exemplified by the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy in the UK, and spurred by the attention from mainstream artists, including Madonna in her collaboration with William Orbit on her album Ray of Light[8] and Australian singer Dannii Minogue with her 1997 album Girl,[9] music of this period began to be produced with a higher budget, increased technical quality, and with more layers than most other forms of dance music, since it was backed by major record labels and MTV as the "next big thing".
It cites American labels such as Astralwerks (the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, the Future Sound of London, Fluke), Moonshine (DJ Keoki), Sims, and City of Angels (the Crystal Method) for playing a significant role in discovering and marketing artists who became popularized in the electronica scene.
In 1997, the North American mainstream music industry adopted and to some extent manufactured electronica as an umbrella term encompassing styles such as techno, big beat, drum and bass, trip hop, downtempo, and ambient, regardless of whether it was curated by indie labels catering to the "underground" nightclub and rave scenes,[11][12] or licensed by major labels and marketed to mainstream audiences as a commercially viable alternative to alternative rock music.
It was also used for various video games, including the Wipeout series, for which the soundtrack was composed of many popular electronica tracks that helped create more interest in this type of music[22]—and later for other technological and business products such as computers and financial services.