quote: | Originally posted by Omnisphere
Like anything humans touch, we tend to always a ruin a good thing. Trance is no different. Dirty games get played in the scene, backstabbing, shady/shifty deals, using bots to prop up views on social media, all giving people the illusion that everything is okay. People also not getting paid royalties either by labels or people they thought they could trust. People promised that they would get paid but then the agent decides to take back on his word and then not pay at all.
If you really want to know how the Trance scene is doing, You don't need to look far. Just see what the commercial trance scene plays and compare it to the tracks from 1990-2005. The quality tanks after that and now it's just filled with white noise, sounds low bit rate, uses noisy claps and they want to make as loud and destructive as possible because that's the only way to get the message out there.
It's this sick mentality that ruined this precious music that brought joy and happiness and helped people overcome through their struggles. It's crushing to see the greatest electronic music evermade being destroyed like this but the underground scene is doing so so far but still getting harder and harder to find those mellow tracks. |
The problem with this post is that it assumes something changed from the early days in terms business; it didn't.
Clubs were always run by shitty semi criminal promoters who would fuck anyone at any chance. Labels always ripped off artists. Bootleggers would popular tracks to make a quick pound/dollar. The only difference was that it was physical records so you could track how many were sold (to a degree) but even they people got stiff which is why a lot producers just took upfront fees for a track or remix (Timo Maas got paid $2k for Doom's night and that was all he ever saw from one of the biggest tracks of the decade).
DJ'ing used to be this mystical art that not many people could do. By the early 2000's, Technics Decks surpassed all guitar sales in Europe. It became far more accessible meaning less talented people due to less barriers of entry and the quality slid. Sasha was harmonic mixing in the early 90's and why his mixes were light years ahead of anyone else. By 2005 Mixed in key was available and I remember a mate bought a set of decks and was harmonic mixing within hours. It didn't mean he was any good but the barrier to entry was gone.
I've talked about this at length but the same thing happened with the music itself. It use to take someone musically talented, with arduous dedication in terms of time, and a financial commitment in the thousands to make all the hardware producer a finished track.
Even then, you then had to find someone willing to press and distribute it, and that was hard up front investment. If the track was shite, no one was going to press 500 copies at 2 quid each (cost) and piss away a grand. Sure, there were the odd idiots/bales with poor taste, but they got burned pretty quick and either disappeared or stopped making that mistake.
These things acted as a quality control filter meaning to get a track out there, you spent years of dedication, and months of work on maybe one track. I remember people like BT and PVD saying they spent anywhere from 4 months to a year on a single track. Chicane's far from the maddening Crowd took two years.
People spent time making tracks and making them well so they would see light of day (or better said, strobe of club).
Fast forward to around 2000 and suddenly you could make a track from start to finish on a somewhat shitty PC, a cracked copy of logic or cubase and less than 2 grands worth of kit. And you could put it out digitally on CD's or even online for free.
It meant labels had zero risks. Just churn the shit out and see if makes money. They could also hide the sales figures. It meant digital labels popped up everywhere and at the same time digital file sharing knocked the bottom out of paid for music.
By 2005 record stores were all but dead and any muppet with a laptop and ableton could churn out some crap track and with the right marketing or logo design, get a few sales.
The rest of the market adapted or died. Armin, Tiesto, BT etc, all changed their sound for the new ADD generation and cashed in.
That's not to say there aren't people putting out great music or DJ's playing great sets, it's just that there's so much more crap out there than ever before due to there basically being no barriers to entry.
I will however agree that in those early days the motives where somewhat different. People like Danny Rampling and Marshall Jefferson and Nicky Blackmarket and Orbital (etc etc) did it for the love and the scene. There was something purely enthusiastic about it and there wasn't these huge sums involved, Don't get me wrong, they made a living, but not like these Vegas idiots getting paid $300k per hour to play lowest common denominator drivel. People don;t realize that Sasha was getting 2-5 grand a night at a club, maybe more at a big rave and would only play 50 to 100 gigs a year tops. Night like the hac were an absolute money pit and a lot of clubs/promoters went bust due to it not really being about money and more about music. It's why you had the rise of the corporate clubs/brands like MOS and even Cream etc.
You can still find the music and clubs and DJ's that give a shit and are still making good music. It's just not the renaissance period where everyone was doing that which led to the sum being even more than the parts.
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