> it's actually less about making catchy beats and more about the marketing, connections in music industry etc

If you make good music you can throw a couple tracks towards a small, local label and stand pretty decent odds of getting signed.

Getting on a tiny little label with some people you like isn't going to be enough for it to be a career, but it's definitely a lot of fun and can be creatively enabling.

Coding can still pay the bills, though!

> I installed FL Studio and tried my hand on making some beats (https://youtube.com/channel/UClKt2vzomuegCDA45SU6FbA/videos). Before I spent too much time on it I released

From 1990 to 2007, I owned a (vinyl) record store (B&M then ecomm) that catered to DJs. I got to listen to quite a bit of "dance music". The early, mid, and even late 90s was jammed packed with creativity and innovative sounds.

Eventually things changed (as Ableton and similar became popular). More and more tracks were "half baked". As you noted, workable / good enough, but the extra time to create magic was not being invested. As digitl came along, it got worse because non-vinyl releases lowered the bar further. In a addition that noise, that glut made the good stuff hard to find.

I'm not a snob. Taking anything more accessible is generally a positive. That said, for "dance music" too easy cause problems. The higher bar of the 90s was a form of quality control. If you invested in gear, you generally did your best to get the most out of it. The culture was quality. Then ease and a lower investment bar put the emphasis on quantity.

I hope you know this already, but just because making dance music became more accessible and it took more time to find the stuff you liked does not mean that it stopped existing. All of the 90s sounds that you've loved have evolved, been rediscovered, died out, evolved again. New genres have been made and then fallen out of fashion. By volume, there is probably more amazing dance music being made now than ever before _because_ it has become so much easier to make, not in spite of it. Not only that, it is probably easier than ever before to discover all of it. That obviously benefits someone just listening to the music, but also all those producers now have access to previously hard to find regional sounds and so the past decade in electronic music is defined largely (just like lots of other genres) by a massive cross-pollination, deconstruction, and incorporation of global dance sounds into new and insanely creative music.

No. I didn't know that. Thanks. (WTF? Smh). After 17 yrs of selling music - to say nothing of the loads I consumed prior and since - the evolution never crossed my mind.

But to take your insight to the next logic step...where is all this innovation and creativity? If the means raised raised the tide, where is the result? The trend, again following your observation, should be a continuous spiral up? Now should be The Pinacle of the craft. The most golden of all golden ages. It should be the late 80s to mid 90s endless stream of "WTF was that?" on steroids.

I still know DJs and working high profile producers and to the best of my knowledge none of them is seeing that.

What are we all missing? Where should we be looking? (That's not sarcasm, like the opening line. It's a serious inquiry. Tia)

I’m confused why you took such offense to that, I was just trying to give you the benefit of the doubt that perhaps you were exaggerating on your distaste for modern dance music. Maybe I misspoke.

If you’re aware of the evolution and still connected to the music scene, I am not sure how you could look at the state of electronic music today and not find a slew of artists and albums released in the past twenty years that at the very least pique your interest. Just in the Detroit milieu (since you mentioned Robert Hood in another comment), artists continue to innovate on the Detroit minimal sound (Omar S, Theo Parrish, Kyle Hall, among others), electro (DJ Stingray, The Other People Place). Admittedly some of these were also releasing music in the 90s…but they didn’t stop then.

Since 2000, we’ve seen the creation of dubstep and footwork (RIP DJ Rashad), and then seen the sounds created in those genres incorporated into the jungle/drum and bass sound among others to create a very fun and interesting array of artists (check out the Astrophonica or Hyperdub labels if you haven’t)

To give you an overview of the entirety of innovative and interesting music that has come out recently would be near impossible because there is _so_ much of it, I don’t know all of it, and I’m nowhere near a musicologist. But even not having sold music for any years of my life, the idea that there is not interesting electronic dance music being released today is laughable. Where should you be looking? Everywhere. Any sound you have ever been interested in probably has people releasing new and interesting music in it all the time. Popularity waxes and wanes but people don’t stop creating.

Everywhere? But that violates my point. The lowering of the bar has lowered quality and thus increased noise. The signal to noise ratio sucks. I would hope you know this already ;)

Maybe go back and reread my comment? Keep in mind it's based on 17 yrs as a shoppe owner, in addition to the years prior and since as a dedicated music aficionado. It's not a perspective you'll get often, as it's not a life many have lived ;)

Dance music seems awful simple but if it's being played live there's a very simple quality test which is, are people dancing to the music?

If you're just on your computer in your room, making beats and perhaps not even moving to them because to you it seems trivial and all about the marketing, you might be glossing over a fundamental part of the music. Seeing what moves an actual dance floor full of real people is important feedback.

True. But there is a difference between minimal (e.g., Detroit legend Robert Hood) and something that is half-baked (e.g., too many examples to list).

Dancing or not, the music is still music and it has to stand on its own, at least in the context of its peers.

When something is cheap and easy to produce and release, there is an overabundance. That glut clogs up the environment (read: the haystack buries the golden needles). Plastic seemed like a great idea at first but then we've (kinda) come to realize cheap and easy ain't such a good thing ;)

It’s about the same as building a startup I’d say. Luck plays a huge role (and there are lots of people trying to divine rules extrapolated from their lucky experience to help you) but I’d also say the music (product) really does need to be incredibly good for you to make it. But maybe it isn’t needed initially as long as you get feedback and develop product market fit for your music, but that would be considered very uncool in the music industry.

> you just need a laptop and DAW to make tracks

You just need pen and paper to unify gravity and quantum mechanics.

You just need a laptop to write the next TikTok.

> less about making catchy beats and more about the marketing

That's a common complaint from unsuccessful artists. Michael Jackson spent a ton of money on marketing his last album and it was a total flop.

In a market oversaturated with good talent, marketing has to be the differentiator.

I don't think what you said is all that different from people who want to be a successful writer but don't really want to write.

Not sure how to interpret your comment. What made you come to that conclusion?

That's a pretty common beginner's trap, to have your motivation be to release music rather than in creating music itself. For basically any beginner you need many years to get to the point where that should be a consideration. Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music. Ironically this is what actually differentiates the greats from those that struggle: the former make music primarily for themselves, the latter make music primarily for others.

"Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music."

On principle I agree with this. Tracks made following a tick list of successful tropes with an eye on getting released are liable to be highly forgettable.

Having said that, as someone who tinkered a bit with production some twenty many years ago before lapsing, and tinkering and lapsing once again a couple of years ago, I would argue that some form of shared community outlet is essential in persisting and making something of greater merit.

I tend to think that the best music is emergent from real-life communities: people, time, place, culture, politics. That is, communities that have an aesthetic and reason for being that goes far beyond, say, craving new synths after watching youtube reviews.

Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real human context. I feel that the lack of this killed my desire to keep making it and improving. It was just an expensive way of shouting into the void.

If you are playing for an audience (can be tiny too!) you will always be much more motivated to produce quality and improve your skills.

That being said it can also put pressure on you to the point where you also lose your joy due to stress.

I guess some middle ground can be found but as with everything that is easier said than done.

> Having said that, as someone who tinkered a bit with production some twenty many years ago before lapsing, and tinkering and lapsing once again a couple of years ago, I would argue that some form of shared community outlet is essential in persisting and making something of greater merit.

Still most of your time with music will be solitary. If you accept that, anything social is just a bonus.

> Music that is not performed and shared, ever, is somehow stillborn. Fun and enjoyment come from the attribution of meaning, and to me, meaning ultimately comes from real human context. I feel that the lack of this killed my desire to keep making it and improving. It was just an expensive way of shouting into the void.

Well you basically just proved my whole point here. You stopped making music because you weren't happy doing it alone. Learn to be totally content doing it alone, and you won't have this issue. It is possible, because I was stuck in your situation for a long time, and thought myself that music was pointless if not socially shared. I realise now that it just isn't true, and in fact that mindset puts huge pressure on yourself and indeed on the community around you. It is possible to enjoy making music without the need for social reinforcement.

Quite agreed. Granted, I come from the world of analog music made on alcohol powered instruments. But in my circle, the vast majority of musicians are delighted with finding non-commercial outlets for their musical interests. This includes some people who are quite skilled, and a few who have music degrees.

Possibilities include: Playing in church (a huge portion of both amateur and commercial music is religious), entertaining oneself at home, jamming with friends, exploring and even performing esoteric music that can't be commercially viable. Even many otherwise successful professional musicians have noncommercial side projects that need volunteers. For instance if someone is willing to compose something new, or dig up something interesting and weird, I'm willing to chip in and help them try it out, just for the spirit of adventure. I'm satisfied to perform for just a small handful of people who share similar interests from the audience side.

It's not all that different than people who are into extreme sports, cooking, etc., without any expectations of ever being competitive at it.

What I keep thinking is that "making X primarily for others" is intended to mean "other people are the driving influence on what kind of X you produce", in a sense that you lose your individuality by creating only what other people want.

However, I often think it's intended to mean "producing X so that other people can consume X, regardless of what results."

And I have frequently heard that it means "producing X so that other people can critique your work and tell you how to improve."

These interpretations seem to be at odds. I've had instructors in creative bootcamps tell me that the difference between the strugglers and the greats was that the greats released their work to the public, got critique on what to improve, and integrated that advice into their next work. In their minds, remaining solitary means you won't get that critique and will always lag behind someone who communicates with others to find better ideas and improve on their own.

So it really isn't as cut-and-dry as "screaming into the void is better", in terms of how I personally frame the distinction.

At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave something in the world that serves as an artifact of what kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I honestly feel.

Put another way, if I were to write a thousand pages worth of novels over the course of my life, never releasing any of it, and just before I was about to kick the bucket I were to pour a bucket of gasoline on the entire pile of paper and burn it to ashes, I would probably feel the worst I'd ever felt about myself up to that point. I would have destroyed a significant product of my existence, and in a sense, destroyed a part of myself.

So maybe this way of thinking is flawed, and this clearly indicates that I am overly attached to my work, and perhaps to the idea of social acceptance as well. But this is why I cannot force myself to create if I know nobody is ever going to share a space with my work. Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?

And this doesn't even have much to do with the solitude that creating something necessitates - I am capable of weathering the darkest, loneliest storms alone, but only if I believe that there is someone at the end of the tunnel who would be able to see what came out of it all. Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.

> At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave something in the world that serves as an artifact of what kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I honestly feel.

Yes, I'm saying you would be better off dropping that, and instead just engaging in pure creation without any dependencies.

> Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?

That's my whole point. You shouldn't need a reason beyond "fun" or "just because" or even "keeping the hands/ears busy".

People are unreliable, having reasons that depend on other people are unreliable. Letting go of that and having only reasons that depend on yourself is reliable.

> Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.

Once again, it is entirely possible to just do it without any sense of reward. I know because I've developed this mindset, while I used to crave reward.

> Your main motivation should be fun and enjoyment of making the music.

It's much like brain surgery. People assume you should start out treating people's illnesses and curing them, but the successful brain surgeons know that you should spend your early years just having fun and enjoy playing around inside people's skulls. It's such a rush the first time you probe someone's central gyrus and see their arms twich. Don't waste your time planning for "in network" glory and how to calculate billable hours, just power up that bonesaw and start shredding.

I don't think my music is bad enough that it will make people braindead