To put some context around this, in my recent Top 50 chart, I cited my belief that mainstream dance music is an industry in decline. Now, while I believe that to be the case, I think it’s necessary to dig past the sound bite, because one could make a pretty good case that electronica, as a music meta-genre, is actually more vibrant than it’s ever been. So as I contradict myself left and right, I think it’s important in this first part to define some scope.

Before I do that, I want to make something very clear:

I’m making my claim that mainstream dance music is an industry in decline as much to challenge people to prove me wrong, as anything else. I honestly don’t want to be right about this. I have a deep passion and love for mainstream dance music; I want it to be vibrant and active. I just think it’s getting less and less so. So prove me wrong.

First, let’s define things a bit. What I personally consider “dance music” is both broad and narrow at the same time. What I’m “into” is what I’ve come to call (as I said above) mainstream dance music. It’s not a genre, as much as a genre-crossing classification. How do I define mainstream dance music? It is music that:

• Is melodic. Unless you know a thing or two about music and music theory, this may be meaningless to you, but melodic music has a central theme of some sort… Musical notes, in defined patterns. Typically those patterns are a popular song form (see below), and each one typically represents the pitches associated with each syllable of the lyrics (if in fact there are words, which is not a prerequisite for a melody; see below). The opposite of melodic is free-form, often called experimental. A lot of hip-hop and rap also lacks a defined melodic element. I can’t really describe this any better; consult a book on music theory for a better explanation.
• Has a conventional popular song form. Some experimental types of music have melodic elements without having a melody per se. What makes that different from what I’m talking about is that—in my view—mainstream dance music has a popular song form. Again, consult a music theory book if you want, but by “popular” I don’t necessarily mean pop music, but any popular music form from the 19th century or so, up to today, whether big band or country or jazz or modern pop or whatever. Put in another context, song form is what we’re talking about when you think of a song having verses of a particular melodic pattern, choruses of a particular melodic pattern, and bridges of a particular melodic pattern. It’s what makes a song recognizable structurally. 
• Is generally vocal. Vocals are not a prerequisite to a dance track by any means, but it sort of goes hand-in-hand with a melody.
• Has four-on-the-floor percussion. You just don’t have mainstream dance songs with 3/4 (waltz) time, like you do in, say, country or folk. They’re always (always) 4/4, with a heavy, defined, consistent kick (bass) drum with which people on a dance floor can keep time.
• Is electronic. This probably goes without saying. I suppose mainstream dance music wouldn’t have to be constructed with fully electronic instruments, and in fact, large parts often are acoustic. But you won’t ordinarily find a so-called dance track made without at least some sort of drum machine.
• Is listenable. This is the most ethereal of any of these attributes. But mainstream dance music is, in my view, music that can also be listened-to off of a dance floor without sounding harsh or putting someone on edge. There’s an awful lot of dance music that is, in my view, only enjoyable in the context of a night at the clubs, or in conjunction with a drug trip. Obviously that’s quite subjective.

I suppose mainstream dance music is sort of like obscenity; it’s hard to define what’s obscene, you just know it when you see it. Many people associate what I know as mainstream dance music, with pop and pop remixes. A dance remix of Lady Gaga or Beyoncé or whoever is, in fact, usually mainstream dance music.

But my definition of mainstream dance extends beyond mere pop and pop remixes to include a lot of techno, vocal trance, some dubstep, and perhaps many other electronic/dance sub-genres. But it’s all melodic, has conventional song form, is generally vocal, has 4/4 time, is electronic, and is listenable.

Examples of mainstream dance music are everywhere:

• It’s the music you hear on radio stations such as iDanceRadio.fm (which I program), Fusion Radio Chicago, BPM (a channel on Sirius/XM satellite radio), Radio Danz (where my mixshow airs), NRRRadio (where my mixshow also airs).
• It’s the music that results from popular producer/remixers like Dave Audé, Klubjumpers, Cahill, Cutmore, Freemasons, 7th Heaven, and many more.
• It’s the music that’s on the Billboard dance charts.
• It’s the music that DJs get on CD subscriptions like ERG’s Nu Dance Traxx or XMIX.
• It’s the music that’s promoted by long-term industry players like Loren Chidez, Brad LeBeau, Claudia Cuseta, Bobby Shaw, and others.

All of that, and more, is what I call mainstream dance music.

So, to be very specific, my contention is that mainstream dance music is what’s in decline. Electronic music as a whole, and dance music more generally, is probably in roughly the same condition with respect to the music industry as a whole as it ever was (well, except for perhaps the disco era, when it all pretty much started, and at which time dance dominated the greater music scene). The music industry as a whole is in decline too in many respects, according to many people, but like dance music, it’s rather a matter of which part(s) you’re looking at.

In any event, with mainstream dance music now defined to the best of my ability, in the next part, I’ll start to look a little more closely at what I think is going on, and make my case about why I think it’s in decline.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Disagree with me? Tell me why… I’m always willing to change my mind.

To expand on that thought, 2011 marks a year of further decline in the music industry as a whole, and dance music specifically. While some may disagree with me on that point for various reasons, I find it objectively demonstrable that the volume of well-crafted, quality music has been heading (and continues to head) downward. I’m not here to debate the point, nor speculate on the reasons for it—if I happen to be right. It’s easy to blame file trading and piracy; too easy, in fact. But I suspect the causes are far deeper than that. I’ll leave it to the experts; all I know is that the situation is getting worse, not better.

In any event, at least for me, it’s remarkably difficult to come-up with a list of even a dozen tracks from 2011 that I’m truly, genuinely, enthusiastically excited about—let alone 50, let alone 100. What you’ll find below is the best I could manage.

You’ll find some important information below the chart. I hope you enjoy the list and find it useful. Please support dance music and keep it alive by supporting with your entertainment dollars the artists, remixers and record labels who bring it to you.

Several things to bear in mind for those reading this chart:

• The artists and tracks listed are those I personally find the most interesting. I don’t read the Billboard charts, and I don’t care about them. I don’t pay attention to what’s on the FMQB chart, or what other DJs play, or even what promoters happen to tell me “everyone else” is playing. I play what I think has the best hook, or the sweetest groove, or whatever else about a song happens to catch my ear. As a result, my top 50 list is likely to be quite different than what you might be expecting.
• As a DJ, I characterize my music as “mainstream dance.” As a result, this chart may not even match your idea of “dance music,” especially if you prefer trance, techno, dubstep, or other sub-genres. “My” dance music is largely melodic, vocal, commercial, mainstream dance with largely house roots. Your mileage may (and probably will) vary.
• The tracks shown here are selected for the chart based on the number of times played, and other objective and subjective factors. In some cases (notably #28), you might see some material here that wasn’t released in 2011, but that for whatever reason I “discovered” and started playing during the year.
• I often play a variety of mixes of a single song. This year, that is taken into account in the data. My “preferred” remix is listed, though I may play others.

It’s no different in music. You may think you’re ready, but you’re not. You think if you just tell enough people, send e-mail blasts, fill up inboxes with unsolicited MP3s, you’ll make it. But this just turns us off, we’re immune to marketing. We only want to find out about products from friends.

But worse, when we finally check you out, we find out you’re just not that good.

I don’t know how it works in the greater music industry, but I can’t think of a truer commentary on music (and music promotion specifically) with regard to the dance music realm.

As an established mixshow DJ, working “regular” DJ, and program director for iDanceRadio.fm, I suppose I’m fortunate in many ways to be the recipient of a fairly huge volume of promotional music, sent to me by artists, producers, record labels, promoters and others, and I am a regular user of zipDJ, a fantastic promotional service for working DJs, not to mention a member of one of the oldest record pools in the country, DDK.

The bottom line is this:

• I hear a lot of new music. I’m hammered with it practically 24×7 from all sides. I’m buried with CDs; my in-boxes are clogged with MP3s and download links.
• Most of it—the vast majority of it, in fact—just isn’t that good.

It’s gotten to the point that I delete the vast majority of unsolicited music promotion e-mail. I judge books (well, CDs) by their covers, and discard unplayed any CDs that clearly lack any professionalism whatever in terms of labeling or packaging. And I speed through zipDJ every Tuesday night as quickly as I can, skipping any track that doesn’t wow me in the first 5 to 10 seconds of listening to its preview sample.

It’s not that I don’t have time for music—I just don’t have time for bad music, and most of it is bad music.

What I truly pay attention to is exactly what Lefsetz said:

We only want to find out about products from friends.

Even then, “friends” are not always who they appear to be; I count many music promoters as friends, and they have a vested interest in what they’re excited about. But even there, some have demonstrated with time that the odds favor their recommendations, biased or not, so I tend to listen to what they have on offer.

Lefsetz has been preaching an awful lot lately about quality (speaking largely to conventional musicians, but it’s applicable to electronic musicians and DJs too for that matter)… About putting-in your time. Paying your dues. Really investing yourself, practicing, and being willing to then just throw it all away—knowing you’re really only then at the starting line.

He’s got a point. One driven home to me recently in a very personal way.

The last three remix projects I’ve undertaken, two of which were for my very good friend (and talented artist) Carol Hahn, have ended in failure. One could argue that perhaps I wasn’t inspired by her recent release Do Your Best, a song she recorded in the 80s that she decided to remake for the 2010s. But the most recent project, a new track from Carol titled Your Love, is a great song. Carol provided some terrific vocals, with her typical attention to detail, and myriad options to work with. And yet, somehow, some way, despite investing dozens of hours of effort, I just couldn’t get a song to come out the other side. A couple of weekends ago, Carol and I decided to call it quits on this one.

I’m hopeful that (I don’t believe in God, but I’m still praying, actually) that when (or if) Carol chooses to approach me again with a project, I’m able to produce a usable track.

But if you listen to Lefsetz, the fact I’ve produced and remixed perhaps a couple dozen dance tracks at this point (not all of which were released) only qualifies me for a lottery to get a ticket to come to the party, so to speak. It doesn’t reserve for me a seat at the table. It does not qualify me to be the guest of honor. And I might not even end-up getting in the door.

I’m actually pretty proud of most of my work. A couple of them (notably the unreleased remix of Vincent Medugno’s Magnetic and my remix of A Little Respect for Nivek Tek and Carol Hahn) I could point to and say with confidence that the quality is on-par with anything any of the “big name” dance producers have done. Maybe I just got lucky.

Failure doesn’t feel good. Maybe in time, I’ll look back and be able to point to something from the failures and say, “I learned such-and-such from that.” For today, it just feels like failure feels, and I’m questioning whether the studio I’ve constructed in my basement will ever be the source of another listenable release again.

What I do know is this: I’ll keep trying. And I’m not going to bother putting out anything that, like so much of what I hear, just isn’t that good. Will everything be the best of which I’m ultimately capable? Probably not. But it’ll be quality—even if that means I might not (as it feels today) release another remix or song until 2014 or so.

Stay tuned.

• My DJ software keeps a record of the number of times I play a track, and when I imported the song
• I extracted a list of all the tracks I imported (started playing) in the 2010 calendar year
• I sorted that list in Microsoft Excel by play counts; the more I played it, the higher it appears on the list
• I manually adjusted the ordering a bit to consider some anomalies

Unfortunately, calendar years is a bad way to deal with this if you’re going by play count, because a track I imported late in December of 2010 wouldn’t stand a chance against a track imported in January, even if it was arguably a better song. When I was manually tweaking the order, my main objective was to make sure that what I most associate as “the best of 2010″ made it toward the top, and that my own remixes were a bit more fairly represented, since I tend to play them a lot.

The results are a pretty typical snapshot of how I DJ, and what music I favor. Many of the big names, big tracks, and big record labels are represented. But also represented are a large number of smaller artists, less-mainstream tracks, independent labels, and a heavy skew toward European imports—as is the case with my bi-weekly charts, and the way I program music for iDanceRadio.fm, too.

The results are as follows:

UPDATED: Fixed at least one duplicate (due to playing multiple mixes of the same song). Thanks, JD.

I suspended my dance music blogging for a pretty simple reason, really… I’m a bit disenchanted with the music industry at the moment. There, I said it. It’s not that I don’t like dance music; I listen to it pretty much from the time I wake-up to the time I go to bed. And there’s a lot of it that’s good. Some is quite good. But broadly, I’m not really seeing any innovation. Dance music today sounds pretty much exactly how it did five years ago. And about the same as it did five years before that.

Sure, we have lots of styles. We have lots of variations and sub-genres and everything else. We have largely east coast peeps (like Sirius/XM’s The Beat) spinning crummy cuts of non-melodic looped noise every-other-song, all day long, that used to be the exclusive purview of 2:30AM high-on-E-crowd-filled club sets. We have annoying trash like “Barbra Streisand” from Duck Sauce that sounds like it was made, start-to-finish, over the course of a lunch hour, and the video for it still fetches 35,000,000 views on YouTube.

Quite honestly, if this is the (dance) music people really want, I’m pretty much over it. Maybe I need to switch to country music.

Anyway, mom always told me if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. As a result, I’ve not said much lately. But truly, as a producer and musician myself, it’s really not helpful to hear comments like, “That sucks ass.” Or, “That’s crap, and I don’t listen to (or play) crap.” There’s a real difference between constructive criticism and just being an arrogant prick, and frankly, the world has too much of the latter already. Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s shit, any more than if you don’t like something, it also doesn’t make it shit. (Although this news will surely come as a shock to some people, and honestly, I still think the Duck Sauce track really is crap.)

But when it comes to the arts, it really is subjective. There’s just a whole lot not to like about a lot of the music that comes across my desk, and whether what mom said was right or wrong, if I can’t say something constructive about it, or at least articulate why I dislike something, everyone really is better off with me just keeping my mouth shut. So I have been.

I am still doing my DJ and dance music stuff. You can still hear my mixshows every weekend. I’m still doing the occasional remix, in a way and a style that pleases me, and I’m still picking the music that gets played on iDanceRadio.fm to a worlwide audience who can choose to agree with my choices by tuning-in—or not, by tuning-out.

But I’m more than a little bit ready for someone to come-up with something truly new. Truly innovative. Something that elevates the art of dance music in a new and creative way. Something that’s respectful of music as an art form. Something that’s not just quick-fix fodder that titillates or stimulates or dominates for a few weeks, before fading out and never being thought about or played again. I suspect it’s going to be a long wait.

In the mean time, I’m working on several tracks of my own. Are they innovative in the way I just described? I highly doubt it. But I’ll enjoy creating it, and hopefully if you don’t like it, you’ll be charitable and give me a better critique than, “That’s crap.” If you don’t, I suppose I deserve it after my Duck Sauce comment. 

Look for more regular musings here in the coming weeks, and as always, leave a comment with any thoughts you might have.

To start (back) off, I’m going to introduce you to an amazing new track out of Denmark, from the group Infernal—Lina Rafn and Paw Lagermann. While they debuted in 1997, their name and music are both new to me. But what a way to make a first impression, with the track, Love is All.

I’m a sucker for great lyrics, and Love is All has amazing lyrics. I especially like the unusual rhythmic patterns in the lyrics, but what they have to say I like even more. Nicely done.

The video that accompanies the song is another matter. It’s well made, well produced, and has some nice effects. But it’s completely incongruous, at least to me. Watch it and see what you think:

Video issues aside, this is just an incredible track that you can expect to continue to hear in my sets for awhile to come.

In this first show, I have a lot of great material for your enjoyment, including a couple of songs from Above & Beyond; one of my all-time favorite trance tracks from Ad Finem; a fantastic recent track from Solarstone & Alucard; plus much more.

I’ll be producing a new Trance Nectar show roughly once every 6 to 8 weeks, and it’ll air (for now) in the new guest spot on iDanceRadio.fm, which is every Friday at 9:00 PM Pacific, 12:00 AM (Midnight) Eastern.

If you have a chance to catch it, I’d love to hear your comments. Look for the second installment in April.

First, it’s important to understand how dance music releases work. Unlike the glory days of the music business, when artists would record and release full albums of different songs, in this digital iTunes / AmazonMP3 age, the world is a pretty singles-centric place. But while that’s new to pop and rock, it’s really the way it’s always been in dance music for whatever reason. An artist (which in dance could really mean vocalist and/or producer and/or songwriter and/or “band” or “group” and/or other things) generally records and releases a single at a time.

Each of these singles generally includes remixes from a range of producers (a/k/a “remixers”). That’s why on iTunes, AmazonMP3, and other places, you see track listings on releases that look something like this:

It’s the same song, in multiple versions, by different producers (remixers). Same artist, same song… But different “takes” on that song. More on that shortly.

In any case, when you see the list like this, those subtitles in parentheses are the remixer credits, usually with a mix type (e.g., radio edit, club mix, etc.) with the remixer name. So, here we see a VisionX mix, a Wesley King mix (that’s me!), a Groove Police mix, etc.

Taken as a whole, these are “maxi-singles” or sometimes “remix packages” for a specific, single song release. Obviously in the digital stores, you can buy and download individual mixes, or you can buy the “album” (the full set of remixes). Most people, I assume, download the individual mix or mixes they like best.

Most dance music releases work this exact way. Sometimes there are fewer mixes, often times more. But the fact is that most dance releases are put out with multiple “remixes” to suit multiple audiences.

Which is a good segue to the second point, different remixes are designed to suit different audiences. There are different styles of dance music, some softer and lighter, and some hard-edged and aggressive sounding. Some are house, some trance, some techno. By having producers create different remixes in different styles, an individual release has a better chance of commercial success. Kids who like techno don’t like the same music as 40-somethings who like filter house. And what works for radio may not work in a club (or vice-versa). And what works on the east coast may not work on the west. But if you release the same song in multiple styles, it’s entirely possible that track will find an audience with all of these people.

And now for the third point, what actually is a “remix” anyway? The term comes from an earlier time, when an artist would record a song on tape. Those recordings had multiple tracks… For example, there would be a vocal track, a drum track, a bass track, a synth track… Each distinct sound would generally have a track all to its own—all of which, when taken together (or “mixed,” literally, using a hardware mixer), form a finished song. A producer could then take that tape, and adjust the levels of each track in the finished mix. Perhaps some tracks would be removed entirely; perhaps new tracks would be added with new sounds. Depending on what the producer wanted to achieve, the finished result could sound entirely different from the original.

These days, everything’s digital. And when it comes to dance remixes, generally speaking, none of the original tracks—other than the vocal—are retained. A producer (a/k/a remixer, such as me) will take the vocal (acapella), and create the rest of the song around it from the ground up. In my software (Ableton Live), it looks like this, visually:

What you see here is time unfolding from left to right, and tracks from top to bottom. (I’m just trying to give this some visual context, not teach you about Ableton; if you want to know more about that, go here.)

In any event, there are still multiple tracks, and so it really is an exercise of adjusting levels, manipulating sound, adding tracks, taking them away… It’s just that the original recording isn’t the source of the work, it’s all rooted in the vocals.

Essentially, being a producer/remixer is being part audio engineer, part musician, part artist and part songwriter. In times past, these were all separate jobs, but with the advent of such powerful music technology for the masses, it’s all rolled-up into a single person when it comes to dance music remixing.

Anyway, I don’t know how other remixers work, but in my remixes, everything you hear other than the vocal is something I created, either through programming or performing. The drums? I programmed those. Synthesizers? I played and recorded them. Piano? I played and recorded that. Bass? Same thing. Some remixers use pre-recorded loops, which is perfectly legitimate, but not how I choose to work. In many cases, I re-arrange the vocal elements, playing songwriter in essence, structuring the parts of the song how I want them. I might retouch the vocal recording… I might create harmonies for those vocals… I might speed it up or slow it down from the artist’s original version. What I do to a track depends on the song, how I feel about it, what inspires me, what hits me in the moment.

I’m sure some remixers work quickly; perhaps many use templates, recycling stuff from older remixes. To date, I don’t do much recycling, and I don’t tend to work that quickly. Each remix is started from a blank canvas, and it usually takes me several weeks to get a foundation put together with the song parts arranged, percussion roughed-in, and other common elements (like the bass) roughed-in. From that point, it’s an exercise of polish… Fixing vocals, adding filters (manipulating sound), adding pads (which are flowing, ethereal sounds), adding other new synthesizer elements, trying things, adjusting levels, adding effects, or pulling things back when I take them too far.

In some ways, it’s like a painting… It takes time to get things roughed-in, and then it’s an exercise of cleaning-up, embellishing, and adding details, and taking it where you want it.

When that’s done, it’s time to get it released. This is where my friend comes back into this discussion; I honestly don’t think he understood that the end point here is making these available for sale. But once I get commissioned to do a remix (by the artist, the label, etc.), yeah, the point is to get it where it needs to be and then hand it off so it can get released to iTunes, AmazonMP3, and other places.

So, the next time you see “Wesley King Mix” (or something like that) attached to a dance track in a digital download store? You now know why it’s there, and what I did to make it happen.

Instead of dance music, I found myself listening to beautiful tracks with Jacinta’s amazing vocals, paired with little more than a piano—laying bare what a talent Jacinta really is. Several months ago, a colleague shared a quote from a program director at a big dance radio station, claiming that Jacinta, “couldn’t sing.” I’m not sure what he’s hearing that I’m not, but after giving Lumina a listen end-to-end, he’s got to be judging some other Jacinta, because this Jacinta can deliver incredible emotion, depth and range.

An album with nine tracks in all, most of the songs were unfamiliar. But I think what makes this release so appealing is that it features three songs that are familiar to any Jacinta fan—but you’ve never heard them rendered this way. Electric Universe (arguably her best song to-date), Destination, and Can’t Keep it a Secret are all included in special “Dark Hours” versions that give each song new meaning and new texture. By stripping each track of its dance treatment, and pairing them with piano, it clears the way to really hear these songs; to digest the lyrics (which are conveniently included in the centerfold of the eco-friendly CD packaging), and to appreciate not only Jacinta’s vocal, but her songwriting skills as well.

It’s difficult to find anything to criticize with Lumina, but the purist in me wishes that the pianos were acoustic grands, rather than digital, a fact that probably would have escaped me if I wasn’t a piano player myself. And some of the tracks retained the digital effects applied to some of the vocal elements in their original versions, which detracts slightly from the “unplugged” flavor of the release.

But neither point diminishes the luster from this touching, emotion-laden, and beautiful collection of songs that is both expected (Jacinta’s vocals) and unexpected (the treatment of the songs); and both surprising (the beauty of the songs), and unsurprising (I already knew how great the songs were, just not how great).

Check it out and see if you agree. Hopefully Jacinta will continue to grace us with both powerful dance music—and the incredible soft side expressed in Lumina, that’s perfect for quieter times, romantic moments by the fire, or when you just need a soundtrack for sitting back and relaxing.

I just posted my Top 25 Dance Chart for the week on my web site. You can read the whole chart by clicking that link, but here’s the Top 10 this week:

This week, five hot new tracks added to my regular playlist:

• Rikah Day After Day (CAPP)
• Bloom 06 Beats and Sweat (Universal)
• Scarlette Fever Lovestruck (Starfisch)
• Dennys Festa Over Again (MODA)
• Chicane Hiding All the Stars (Universal)