Why Do Dance Tracks Have Short Life Time?

And why is it rare to find a track that you can play over and over?

they don't and it isn't.

or: how much do you actually like dance music?

I constantly listen to dance tunes that are 10-25 years old, so I think your premises are flawed.

(x-post)

I could listen to this shit forever!

Still sounds fresh to me after 20 years.

old tracks i heard while going out this year iclude lil louis 'french kiss', der dritte raum 'hale bopp', vapourspace 'gravitational arch of 10', lfo 'lfo', bangalter 'outrun', and knarz 'tanzmaschine'. not to mention all the old stuff at italo nights, and unstoppable semi-old stuff like orange mistake, welcome back kotter (mayer/thomas mix), sky was pink (holden mix) and erotic discourse. also the kids @ the local prole disco demand to hear 'we are your friends' and 'one more time' at least once a night, or else. so this is bs basically.

in answer to the initial question its because dancing is tiring so eventually u have to stop

Well, I'm not talking about the classics. I believe that tracks from Juan Atkins et al will be remembered forever. What I meant are the current hit tracks like "Nesrib" or "I Want To Sleep". As good as they are, I doubt people would still listen to them a year from now.

And by over and over, I mean three or more times consecutively in one sitting, not over and over in years interval. For example, when I found out how great "Man With The Red Face" was, I didn't have the urge to re-listen to it immediately. It'd felt kinda tiring, you know what I mean? But I could listen to Wilco's "Jesus, etc." or Built to Spill's "Car" without getting tired quickly..

for the love of suffering black jesus

dnftt

what?

Sounds like you like to listen to indie rock tracks repeated times in one sitting, but not dance tracks. Which seems like far more a question of personal taste than anything worth extrapolating from.

However, to treat your query with a margin of seriousness, perhaps it's because listening to a good dance track once, or eight times in a row, often times could be the same thing, given that many electronic dance tracks have a kind of flattened structure that's very different from rock's and pop's verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/etc. forms. what you jones for in pop music, in fact, may well be just a single climactic moment in each song. that makes sense for pop, as that's how it stimulates. but given electronic dance music's repetitive nature, it's not going to reward the same desires, at least not all the time.

Don't forget they're generally longer, and many are designed for trackiness (see above post) and made to be listened to in mixes. of course this isn't always the case (and you could get into murkier territory w/r/t appropriate time and place to listen to certain things, which is almost entirely all bullshit anyways). And then again, I couldn't even tell you how much time I've spent listening to Ball'r (Madonna Free Zone) in the last 36 hours. . .

Sometimes I'm a little sad that some things from even a few months ago I probably won't get to hear out again, never mind from 2005 or 2006 or so. And I realise that yes, some of these records will not 'stand the test of time', they were played, enjoyed, discarded, they served their purpose

But I still like them!

But I don't think it really matters too much, in fact I think I prefer it. I think I prefer that each years music stays within its year (when played out) with maybe the exception of a few here and there. I like the idea that each year seems instantly recognisable and redolent to me in some way

At home? My faves are from many different years. I like a lot each year, but actually LOVE quite a small selection I think, when it comes down to it. They're an odd old bunch each year

Some of my fave dance tracks from the last 20 years or so are completely forgotten it seems. But the same is true of many things. I don't need to hear them out, they are in my heart and my soul and can be played and loved at any time

Let us think of tomorrow, for it has the potential to bring us more than yesterday

Personally I don't think the initial premise of the thread is true, as some of my favorite tracks of ever came out from the early 70s to the late 90s and are dance records.

But chart-wise/cred-wise there always has been a mad rush for DJs to play the "latest and greatest", and i think that does tend to shorten the shelf-life of a lot of dance tracks. That seems to be less and less prevalent then it used to be, both with "traditional DJ culture" as much as with people like Avalanches/2 Many DJs/etc making it popular to crate dig and play old stuff that was probably missed the first time around, or to play feel-good tracks regardless of category, etc

ridiculous thread. i think my experience was similar to fez' in the last 12 months; i heard old trax practically every time i went to a club.

in one three-week period i heard 'love can't turn around', 'do you wanna funk?' by sylvester, 'acperience 1' (twice on the same night, haha), 'the bells', 'muzik x-press', that old dance mania track about there being a lot of "hoes in this house, if you see em point em out", cowley mix of 'i feel love', 'optimo', 'energy flash', 'brighter days' by cajmere, etc etc etc etc.

Not a ridiculous thread really. Lots of stuff does have a short shelflife, not in terms of its theoretical longterm playability but in terms of its practical real-life omnipresence (in certain quarters at least) followed by obscurity.

One issue here is that dance music is frequently consumed in the mix and on dancefloors, where the identity of a particular track is less important to defining the experience of the night than the overall sound of the set. Tracks that are particularly tied to a certain type of "sound" often stop being played regularly once DJs start to move away from that sound as the defining identity of their sets.

This isn't a hard and fast rule because the development of DJ/dancefloor tastes is not symmetrical or linear across the board, anymore than the transformation/"progression" of music generally is. Sounds go out of favour with one audience and come into favour with another: some DJs might have been playing Daft Punk in the late 90s who don't play them now, while others only picked up on them with the rise of nu-rave. Likewise some traditionalist house DJs might be over DJ Gregory just as UK Funky DJs are snapping up his old records.

The poppier/crossover end of any scene is always a big exception to these cyclical rules because they enter a sort of shared popular/populist canon, especially for DJs and audiences who aren't consciously trying to push a presentist sonic aesthetic.

One of the interesting things about cratedigging/revivalism is that it usually doesn't restore old, obscure tracks to widespread replayability until such time as the sound which that record represents itself becomes fashionable again (even if only for a particular audience). But once a sound has been revived it usually never goes back out of fashion again - which is why, for example, the italo revival has now lasted longer than italo itself did.

Case in point: all the tracks that Haitch mentioned are now fairly old and the sound they represented has come back into fashion at least once.

One is less likely to hear DJs pushing the electro-house sound of 2004 when one goes out.