dance music

dance music (uncountable)

1. Music composed to accompany social dancing.
   • 1915, Virginia Woolf, chapter XII, in The Voyage Out, London: The Hogarth Press, published 1949, →OCLC:

     From all sides her gift for playing the piano was insisted upon, and she had to consent. As very soon she had played the only pieces of dance music she could remember, she went on to play an air from a sonata by Mozart.

   • 1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XLVII, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC:

     In the bar in which Strickland and Nichols sat a mechanical piano was loudly grinding out dance music.

2. (modern usage) Ellipsis of electronic dance music.
   • 2015 June 28, “It was 20 years ago today: the year British dance music went wild”, in The Observer‎:

     Britpop had revitalised rock, and an unprecedented explosion in dance music – sparked off by a second consecutive sunny and idyllic Glastonbury – transformed how Britain thought, listened, partied and came down afterwards.

It is possible to use dance + music in reference to any music played or composed for dancing. But in general parlance, it is rarely used for certain styles, for example, ballet music. The gloss (music composed to accompany social dancing) can refer to many kinds of both folk and popular music, ranging from polka to the macarena. As a synonym of electronic dance music (EDM), it refers to a complex array of modern styles like house and techno, and is often used to differentiate the EDM-influenced genres of hip-hop from the rapping-focused genres (in phrases like hip-hop dance music).

• ballet music
• vernacular dance