Finding the Rhythm

In a couple of weeks, I head to Las Vegas for several days to attend the annual Billboard Magazine Dance Music Summit. I’ve not been before, but based on conversations with people who have, my expectations are fairly low. I am, however, looking forward to going so I can see and hear for myself the tenor of the dance music industry in the US (or at least as much of it is in attendance there).

I imagine I’ll get to meet or at least see people like Cory Robbins, Patrick Moxey and others, and I’d really like to get a sense for where their heads are at. Some talent is supposed to be there too, including Kristine W., The Crystal Method, and others.

One of the things I continue to find puzzling is why dance music represents about 1% of the music industry in the United States (OK, I made that up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually is 1%), and at least in Europe, is far more accepted, for more popular, and much better represented on radio and in sales. While Robbins and Moxey in particular most likely represent and garner a disproportionate percentage of the dance music market in the US with their respective record labels (Robbins and Ultra), with their distribution deals and clever marketing, and clearly someone makes some money with dance music here, it feels on some days like it’s me and a handful of people I know who are the sum-total of the listener base for dance music in the US. And while that’s obviously not true, what is true is that dance and electronic is a drop in the music industry waters here.

As I think I’ve blogged before, the longer I DJ, the more people in the industry I meet, and the people I know, even people that from the outside that you’d think of as “stars” in the industry, are still working day jobs to pay their bills. Something is broken here.

Frankly, I’d like to understand what, and why. Arguably, the entire music industry is broken, not just dance music. (I’m not the only one who thinks so; Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora and a former band musician, had some interesting comments here in page two of an interview with him on C|Net.) But why doesn’t dance music command its fair share of the overall music industry—whether that industry is broken or not?

I doubt I’m going to find all my answers at the Billboard Magazine Dance Music Summit, but I do view it as a fact-finding mission, and I look forward to sharing with you what I find out.

As I have told my good friend, recording artist Cary August, I believe that dance music could be big (or at least bigger) in the US if everyone in the industry was firing on all cylinders and willing to work together toward a common goal. I don’t know the industry well enough to know this for sure, but it appears from where I stand that everyone is too busy protecting their little piece of turf and sweating about bigger industry issues (like declining CD sales) to entertain the notion of working together to promote dance music itself.

In any case, while I work in my own small way to promote dance music, I’m committed to continuing to figure all this out. Stay tuned.