Specific by the strong influence of technology on the music-making process, electronic music has grown from a counterculture of the early rave movement into a massive global phenomenon of popular culture. The purpose of the work is to establish the social function of electronic music events as a more and more popular form of entertainment in modern society. In the first part of the paper, this is approached by showing the potential role and nature of these events as a social ritual through comparison with anthropological concepts of liminality and liminoidity. The utopian aspect of the genre stood out as an important element at the intersection of ideology related to the beginnings of electronic music and the affective effect of its performance (the reaction of the listener and the embodiment of sound in the act of dancing). This progressive utopian impulse partly invokes the possibility of freedom and personal transformation, which corresponds to the description of liminality. However, in everyday pop-cultural practice, it is mainly reduced to the model of liminoidity (a kind of pseudoliminality of industrial and post-industrial consumer societies). This problem is further elaborated in the second part of the paper, where electronic music festivals are analyzed as an expression of a consumer society. A concrete example of Outlook and Dimensions festivals shows how the utopian or socio-critical values of the electronic music scene, more typical of counterculture or underground culture, are easily transformed into commodities. Therefore, the idea of a liminal potential of these events is additionally undermined in practice. Electronic music festivals mostly retain a dual character and role: on the one hand, they destabilize certain social conventions, creating a space of momentary and partly apparent freedom; on the other hand, temporarily discarded conventions and relationships are being strengthened in the long term. This raises a question about the manipulative role of these gatherings and the existence of a consumer's free choice when it comes to participation in consumption practices.