Is Dance Music Dead Steve - O2 Academy
Says it's more fragmented
Is Dance Music Dead: Steve - O2 Academy
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Name Steve Hoyland
Job General manager, O2 Academy
Nights Vodka Nation, Pet Sounds
How would you describe the music played at your night?
Vodka Nationwide plays commercial dance, a bit of cheesy club music - a classic student night. In Room 2 they play chart and light drum’n'bass. Pet Sounds on a Saturday plays indie-alternative favourites and a few remixes of indie tracks with electro.
What do you think of the Leeds club scene?
It’s very healthy and very vibrant. It’s a lot more healthy than, say, Liverpool, where I was last year, but it’s a bigger city so it should be. It’s very strong for electronic music - it seems to me that it’s saturated with mainly dance and electronic nights.
What do you think of the dance music scene on the whole?
Well, it’s very healthy but it’s become a lot more fragmented. You still see a lot of successful smaller clubs but what you don’t see any more is dance club nights with 2,000-plus people. Instead you’ll see more popular, competitive, smaller events. People want two or three rooms of music now, to have the choice. It’s more about music than the lifestyle now. And because of the digital age, people have access to music a lot quicker - anyone can download everything, so people can be a lot more creative in their choices.
Have you noticed any trends in the requests you get at your nights?
One of the most requested tracks in our main room is a remix of Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’ so -there you see an amalgamation of indie and electro. That’s the way it’s going - people like to pick and choose, they want the choice. The dance music mainstreams, too, have merged. What you’ll find is that pure electronic music merges, and although you’ve still got real underground drum’n'bass, still got real underground techno, and breakbeat, everything in the mainstream is merging now. If you want to have a more mainstream experience you’ve got to merge tastes. Look at the acts now - Hot Chip, for example, fusing electronic beats with guitars.
Is dance music dead?
No, it’s not. We’re going to be doing some pretty big standalone dance events, and we’re Leeds’ biggest venue, so that proves it. People still want it - it’s not dead, you’ve just got to be a bit clever in the way you go about presenting it.
Posted on Wednesday 18th February 2009
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