It takes only one look at the grandeur of today’s electronic music culture to see that dance music has never been bigger or more celebrated than it is now. The scale of its stadium-quivering events, the numerous dance-dominated charts and the hundreds of millions of ecstatic fans make it hard to imagine the times when dance music was nothing more than a small dot in a stubborn world that didn’t want to embrace change at first.

So how could something so small and initially insignificant have grown into a booming industry against the odds? And who so bravely put the pieces together, drastically changing the course of music evolution? Read on for an eventful roller coaster ride through the history of dance music.