If it makes you feel any better I turned 39 years old this year and I absolutely LOVE hands-up techno & even jumpstyle which is the latest craze amongst teenagers. But don't get me wrong.. I grew up listening to 80's pop & rock.. and was a die hard fan of the Scorpions all the way across the board to being a nut about Ric Ocasek & The Cars back in the 1980's.
I didn't get into dance until I became a fan of The Cure, New Order & Depeche Mode around 1987-92 with their remixes from their albums.
From that point on I was so into hit dance songs (whether they were original or covers.. house or euro.. it didn't matter to me as long as the production was solid). I actually feel very fortunate as I like to think that I can deliver the best of all worlds now to our fans (the actual buying consumers LOL).
For example, if you listen long enough through our techno portion of our catalogue (or our internet radio station idancetechno.fm) you'll start to hear that they are all catchy "commercial" techno remixes and are true to the original pop arrangements (with full lyrics & hooks) just in a different sub-genre of dance music.
This applies to to all our subgenres we promote. For example, with Rikah's "Out Of Time" I wouldn't actually categorize her music in any particular dance sub genre necessarily.
To extend on this further with a better explanation; I produced the original radio edit (yes I am producer too.
) with my co-producer Martin Stehl (aka Steely M.) and we made a nice straight forward filter house pop mix but then I had some additional remixes produced by my friends Oscar Salguero (more club house), DJ Cobra (trance) and Alex Twister (aka De Lorean) with his hands-up techno mix. All suited quite well for the various compilations we released on iTunes as well as for the various DJ's that prefer some mixes over others.
Then we produced another song for Rikah entitled "Everything Is Changing" and the original mix we produced was also straight-forward dance house pop with some additional remixes. About a year later, I had a remix produced by the German producers known as Verano and it became a major dance hit internationally in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. To this day is remains a major selling track on our popular US Top-10 iTunes dance album "50 Techno Electro Tunes" for 1-year straight ! The point of all this is that what we had produced originally for our US market as a pop house dance sound (made especially catered for our US industry radio and club market) ended up being more favored by the actual consumers for her techno remix by Verano for the majority of iTunes "US" fans in concrete sales numbers.
In other words... everything changes with time and If we don't open our ears to new sounds (and especially the industry including me as it was my main mixes that play on radio today here but don't sell at all to our consumers in the same market) then we are definitely "all" doing something wrong here. What we need to do is listen to what the consumers are buying, then support those commercial mixes on radio instead of us all being so opinionated of what we think the public wants in these dance sub genres. As the public will just bypass us all (your radio station, my main mix, TV or whatever) and just get the music (the remix version) they want, when they want it and where they want it.
The bottom line is.. good music is good music.. whether its a pop house mix, an electro pop mix, a trance mix or even a hands-up techno or jumpstyle mix. If the hit arrangement is there and the production is solid- then anything can work in dance music.
I hope I am making sense of all this.
