What's wrong with the industry?

In this blog I'm going to be 1000% straight and frank, though I have no purpose to offend someone or to make people feel bad, but I believe that if you close your eyes facing a monster it will not go anywhere, you still have to fight it and you better do it with your eyes wide open and your weapon ready.

These days I see so much people's frustration with the industry, algorithms and with how theirs careers are going. But here's the question - is it really something wrong with the industry or... a very painful thought - is it something wrong with you?

If you're seeing other producers and DJs being successful, making good money, having gigs, maybe there's nothing wrong with the industry. Yes, maybe the numbers are not as good as they were 10-15 years ago, DnB and Dubstep are not mainstream anymore, but don't you agree there's a good reason for it? I may sound like an old fart, but music these days is not as good as it was back then. A good song is all about emotions, not necessarily some romantic, melodic emotional stuff, but about any type of emotions that music triggers. It's when you're showing someone who's completely unrelated to DnB a song and it touches one. Remember everyone going crazy with The Prodigy - Breathe (released in 1997, so ahead of it's time!!!!!!), though it's dark and heavy as hell, but it went mainstream because it caused emotions. Another good example - basically any Pendulum song, if you show Witchcraft to people who are not familiar to DnB they will totally love it and they will check some other songs of this band, finding some heavy gems like Slam and Tarantula as well as some melodic hits like Watercolour and The Island. It's like a religion, you're making those people convert themselves into your DnB religion by triggering some good emotions. These kind of songs are making our religion grow, the amount of people involved into the genre (industry) is directly proportionally to the quality of the music. One single successful producer/band can attract millions of new people to the whole genre (The Prodigy, Pendulum, Skrillex, NERO, Noisia), making other artists of this genre benefit, inspiring them and providing them with a wider audience.

Now we're getting back to the same question - are there a lot of producers and bands producing hits the scale of Pendulum, being able to sell their music to a major label who will invest some top dollar into it? Yes, there are some singular hits like Baddadan, Bombalaya and others here and there, but it's not enough to scale it all up back to the mainstream. And most of the complains with the industry that I hear are coming from people making Neurofunk, who are deeply rooted to the underground. No wonder you can't expect huge numbers making underground music in a genre that's overall back to the underground more or less. Chasing LUFs and crazy sound design we are forgetting about the emotions, and that's the exact thing that makes your parents like some of the songs you play them, not the loudness and weird sounds. And also a huge problem that's making me sad is that the only good option to make some money for a DnB producer is to have gigs, which keeps the whole industry focused on making songs for playing in clubs, but not to listen to at home. These songs are mostly with the same dumb simple rhythms, patterns, moods. If I listen to some modern DnB mix it sounds like a single 60 minute drop, no difference in songs at all. Let's be honest, music suck so much these days that I even stopped listening to it. When I plug my headphones the only thing I can listen to is some science podcasts, audio books or some old classic songs from NERO, The Prodigy, Pendulum, Noisia, Burial and other hits, while 15 years ago my playlist was full of fresh stuff from the same NERO, Pendulum, Chase and Status, Skrillex, Flux Pavilion and others.

I've been always making songs for people to listen to at home, to experience some emotions to play on repeat, but then I started getting into DJing and understood that my songs are not working in clubs with lots of people on drugs, raving, going apeshit non-stop. I was very disappointed to accept the fact that a lot of creative and talented producers are facing the same problem and are fighting themselves to start making some club-oriented dumb DnB, putting their creative and interesting ideas into a bin. How can we fight this? Let's start making hits, let's collaborate with real vocalists not just resample some old movie quotes, let's use our own vocals even if we can't sing professionally, human mind strengthens an emotional bond with a song when there's a human personality behind it (fun fact: in a breakdown of the Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Songs in 2017, an analysis found that only three tracks out of 100 didn’t have vocals), let's record real live instruments like guitars, orchestras, choirs etc. We have to do all this if we want to bring the underground back to the mainstream like those legends did before us, making it possible to earn money with our music actually selling it, not just playing live. If you feel that you have an exceptional talent that you're not using at 100%, why waiting, be brave, go ahead and be the one who flips the industry upside down. How to do it? That's the question we're about to discuss in my next posts.

Thanks for reading through!