UK bass

Bass music is a more general term for styles of electronic dance music, including dubstep, 4x4 garage, miami bass, hardstyle, dubstyle, breakbeat, future jungle, the genres of jungle, drum and bass and certain forms of trance and house music, among others. The phrase began to be used in response to the blending of sounds between genres and frequent misrepresentations of genre by casual fans. Dubstep pioneer Skream is quoted in an interview with The Independent in September 2011 as saying "The word dubstep is being used by a lot of people and there were a lot of people being tagged with the dubstep brush. They don't want to be tagged with it and shouldn't be tagged with it - that's not what they're pushing... When I say 'UK bass', it's what everyone UK is associated with so it would be a lot easier if it was called that."

At the turn of the decade the explosion of dubstep-adjacent styles in the United States increased the exposure of the genre. The movement, to which Los Angeles-based DJ Skrillex is attributed association with, garnered the attention of millions of casual fans with a less nuanced understanding of the historical and stylistic features that define the sound and the culture. Exhausted by pedantic dissections of genre definition by longtime followers and inaccurate labeling by neophytes, many followers of heavier modern electronic dance music have come to adopt the phrase "bass music", which highlights the respective genres' overarching similarity, emphasis on lower-end frequencies.