This Week in Dance Music

This Week in Dance Music is a new weekly series by Blisspop aiming to highlight and provide nuanced commentary on the biggest stories in the dance music world.

One of the main goals we set out to achieve when we started this series was to start taking a real pulse of how our corner of music is doing, and where it’s headed. Although we value the many online publications listed as references for the stories below, we have often found that the music industry, and dance music itself, is all too happy to sort of keep conversation glossy and non-offensive. So we thought we’d take some of these weekly hot topics and give them to you on the rocks.

Two Confirmed Deaths at Lost Lands Festival Last Weekend

While we mostly focus on house and techno here at Blisspop, we love all of dance music, and it’s hard to ignore the troubling news that came out of Ohio from Excision’s Lost Lands Festival this week. Throughout the weekend, stories poured in on Reddit and Twitter not only criticizing bad behavior from festival security, but a rampant amount of drug overdoses people claimed to be witnessing. While the cause of the two deaths has not been confirmed yet, it is widely expected to be caused by party drugs mixed with fentanyl by bad dealers (with some claiming that they were mixing it into the water at watering stations!). Add this to the fact that two people were run over by a car in the camping ground Friday night, and it’s no surprise that the festival was shut down early because of “bad weather”. Although the blame can’t be put on the festival itself it’s a bad look all around for America’s rave culture, and should be formed into a rallying cry for why drug testing should be available at all major festivals to protect people.

Paul Oakenfold Plays Stonehenge

On a lighter note, Paul Oakenfold just recorded a live album at Stonehenge. There’s some low-hanging fruit here for jokes about old age but I leave it to the guys at Wunderground to write that headline. This is an amazing occurrence made even better by the fact the Carl Cox showed up for a b2b halfway, and that the entire set is going to be released as apart of a live album. What I really want to know though is what the acoustics sounded like bouncing tracks off those massive stones.

Unsigned Artists Will Soon Be Able to Upload Music Directly to Spotify

For those of you not familiar with how Spotify works for up and coming, independent artists, the process of getting your music on the platform is not as simple as one may think. For years, the streaming site has operated through online distributors, which small artists pay a fee to get their music on Spotify. By allowing (some) independent artists to now upload music to Spotify directly, the company is essentially aiming to cut out all the middlemen in this process, labels included. If this move is successful, it could shape the future of the music industry itself, as Spotify could just because of the one-stop shop for all ends of music sharing and consumption. I have my doubts, however, that this facade of “helping the artists” is all PR, the only person who is going to benefit from this larger slice of pie are shareholders.

Vinyl Sales more than Double Previous Estimates

I’m by no means a vinyl guy so I wont try to act excited for something I don’t fully appreciate, but unlike the story above, I think this development is ACTUALLY a good sign for independent artists and music as an art form in itself. I haven’t owned a tangible piece of music since middle school and that’s just sad to think about.