HW20 | The Hottest Dance Club Treats - a podcast by Keith a.k.a. K j A M

Party Favorz is back with the annual HW20 dance club edition featuring all treats and no tricks.



This set is jam-packed with EDM, House Music, Disco House, Bootlegs and Mashups with just enough spooky fun elements to fulfill its title.

The Spofitication of dance music

I have to say that it's becoming more difficult to compile these commercial dance sets since the shut down of venues across the nation. Typically I rely on a variety of factors to create these sets. First, I look at Billboard's Dance Club charts to see what other DJs across the country are laying down, I look at Beatport and Traxsource charts to see where underground and disco tracks are crossing over, I peruse the Billboard Top 100 for those commercial hits that weren't necessarily created for the dancefloor but some enterprising up and coming DJ has generated a masterful bootleg of, I look at YouTube music trends and of course I look at the DJ services internal charts to see what are the hottest tracks everyone is jumping on before they go wide scale.



Two other elements are my internal gut feeling about a song, which comprise about a 1/3 of all tracks included in a set and the Billboard Electronic Dance Music chart, which I have a love/hate relationship with. Much like the Billboard Top 100, this chart's rankings are heavily weighted towards streaming service plays form Spotify and Apple Music. The rest is based on sales and radio play both of which carry less weight. This has resulted in two things:



1) Many artists just release single after single generating buzz, play and revenue, while forgoing the traditional album release. In fact, boutique labels have developed a whole business model around this and many of these stellar tracks never make it into the DJ pool nor Beatport.



2) Bigger artists still put out albums because there's still money in sales both physical and non-physical. At the same time, they game the system by dropping everything at once flooding these charts with mediocre songs and a couple of stellar ones that may or may not even reach the top of those charts but still generates significant amounts of revenue for them. We've seen it with Drake and Chainsmokers. In particular, Chainsmokers are still a big draw but by dumping everything all at once, they end up with 12 songs on the Electronic Dance Music chart even though none are massive hits. It dilutes the chart and drowns stellar songs by new artists that struggle to break through.



The other end of this is that the songs on this chart rarely get remixes unless someone creates a bootleg. In fact, many aren't really dance songs at all so the entire chart is a bit of a mystery to me. After all, everything today is quantifiably Electronic Dance Music. The two biggest breakthroughs of 2020 on the chart that had crossover success are Imanbek's remix of Saint Jhn's "Roses" and Surfa Mesa's "ily (i love you baby)" — the latter generating stellar Future House remixes, which helped propel the song further. But, these are the exception and not the rule.



As such, most of these songs (and even the danceable ones) are more like radio edits and never get remixes. They're geared toward the Spotification of dance music for radio playback.

Dance club music is on lockdown

Because labels are commissioning fewer and fewer remixes as a result of the pandemic and the reason the Dance Club chart is shut down (because it relies on DJ feedback based on live plays) it makes sense for them to foc...

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