Is Electronic Dance Music Boring? Is Your Music Boring? How Can We Stop It?

Electronic dance music can be…well…boring. Now it is not intended to be- who would want to make boring music. But it…can be.

Remember, and this is quite important and a huge theme running through the website. Your aim is to make music to please the audience that you are trying to target- no one else.

Now don’t shoot me down for this, but this is a great way to help you make better electronic music.

But lets start off with the main reasons of why it can actually be boring:

Some sub genres of electronic dance music can be boring to those who don’t really like the genre. It can just be drones or a continuous loop with effects added to it. Obvious right. But if you want to listen to what EDM is about and you happen to jump into one of these genres then your thought then of EDM could be boring.
The second and more often the most common reason is that you are directly copying what is in style at the moment. This is OK to get the vibe and to “keep up with the times” but there has to be a song that cuts away and becomes different.
What is going to wipe out your listeners is the failure to adapt and to change but to keep what they love about you alive.

Can you change your electronic dance music too much?

It is very difficult especially if you pin yourself into a corner and want to try something new. This is why some artists come up with different identities.

For instance I am a Prodigy fan. Loved their first few albums but then in “Fat Of The Land” they went very rock. Now Prodigy has their roots in rock music and this influence can be heard in their tracks- but it was just an influence. When they started to show their overt rock influence in their music, for me, it didn’t work. I didn’t like the album. Then I started to look for artists that were similar to what The Prodigy was about in their early years. Jump forward to their latest album and they have done what was needed, for me. They kept with their old style but cranked up the newness of the music. It sounds more mature, it sounds like them but…better.

If you copy your influencers then you are sounding like them- which could be good to capture some of their audience. But it can also make the genre quite samey and this is where the boredom factor kicks in.

Cher’s “Do You Believe” dance song (yep it can be classed as electronic dance music) sounds just like every other dance song for that time- so the framework was there. Thud of the kick drum and a catchy chorus with synths. However what really made it stand out was the vocals which were autotuned to the max to create that odd effect. It was just enough for that tune to stand out and become a hit.

There are some aspects of electronic dance music that should be there but there are no written down/ hard of stone rules to go by- just guidelines.

So the kick snare kick that we always seem to hear is a good driver of music. But who says you cant spice it up a little bit by:

adding effects
adding real drum sounds
adding in different tempos
adding vocal hits or other sounds
adding in other genre style loops

The list is quite endless. There is also a thought that you might not need the full kick. Maybe just a bass or even just the snare. The cool thing about electronic dance music is trying different things and seeing what sounds great and also keeping with your style.

Anything in a song just doesn’t have to be there just because people have done it before. Adding real sounds to electronic tunes makes them different. So instead of synth strings why not go for orchestral strings. They are the same idea but just, different.

But how about if you want to go down a different genre?

Well, you can do what some of those musicians have done as mentioned before- go under a different name. Or you can do what Taylor Swift did. Now I know it is not an electronic dance music example but it is a easy to understand example.

Whatever you think of Taylor and her songs one thing is for sure, she is very clever at writing music. Her original style was Country. She got an audience with Country music and turned it around a little bit to make that audience slightly younger. Then, unsure who decided it, but her songs then started to slide towards the Pop nature and feature less of the Country aspect. But it was done slowly. It was a gamble and I would think a thought out gamble. That audience probably likes Pop music as well- there is a large probability of that. But moving over to Pop music slowly didn’t jolt out the original audience too much. Some would have dropped away but she would have gained new fans in the process.

In a different example you have Youtube. Some gaming personalities on Youtube started with MineCraft. Those videos are some of the highest ranking gaming videos. Then some started to look towards other games- like Fortnite. The audience is not too dissimilar but the games are. Some Youtubers lost a lot of subscribers because of the huge jolt in game preference. Others created other channels to put other content on. Others just kept with it.

You have to be careful that you can transition over slowly using the same/ similar audience or else it will be a shock to the system. Then it will take time to build back up again.

Test?

You can also test. That is the coolest thing about being online. It costs nothing to put up a track online and to see how it does.

So if you wanted to see if your track will be warmly welcomed, put it up online and see if your fans like the direction. If they do then you can experiment some more, if not then don’t storm off. Ask your fans why. Why is a really good idea and not usually ultilised by many people. Why will tell you…why…your track was good/OK/ bad and not what you think or assumed to think was wrong with it. It is feedback that you need. It is not being critical of your work it is finding out how to better it. Sure you are going to get some troll who has an issue, there will always be those. But when 80% of the comments are constructive then that is a good thing. Then you can change up a song based upon that feedback and release it. See what people think now.

The point?

What you are also trying to do is get your audience involved. Involved in your work. More involved people will use your products more which will in turn create better customers for the future. You are not trying to alienate with your work which is amazing because it has come from you :) You are trying to figure out how to make your music better for you with the side effect of growing an audience.

For example, you make really cool electronic dance music but the only thing is that you crank up the drums so they distort very badly. You think it is loud and great. This is the only issue. Your audience tells you this. They want to listen to your verse and chorus structures over and over again but are limited in this because the distortion wreaks the music, their ears and their speakers. You can either:

lower it down a bit, learn and using some Effects, make a better sounding kick with no distortion like the pros do.
Or you can keep with what you have, its your music, they should love it.

See how this can help?

To a point, the music industry is in the people pleasing industry. Your music is a product and you are allowing someone to listen/ buy your product. That person is therefore a client/ customer. Without those people liking/ buying and sharing you do not have an audience.

It is in the same vein of how to make your music much better- in fact in 9 different ways.