I think it's a bit of both, in that it's very often driven by the musicians, and it may be described as a marketing strategy. But you have to bear in mind that most of the music produced under the terms described so far is produced in relatively limited pressings, often outside the usual major-label system of production and promotion. Your average drum and bass producer, eg, is probably releasing his/her recordings through a small label, possibly self-released even, and giving most of the copies away to DJs and pirate radio in the hope of getting some play. Other than the big name DJs and producers (who represent a very small minority of those making music), no one is making any real money here - so terms like 'marketing strategy' can be deceptive. However, within the economy of getting people to dance at a club/turn up their pirate radio at home/burn a mixtape for their mates, then the genre distinctions are, I think, pretty fundamental as a way of identifying similar artists and navigating your way around.

They're also pretty important to the way that the music tends to be produced and disseminated. Most of this music isn't played as - isn't written for - individual tracks, but is worked into a DJ's playlist over a couple of hours at a club. That DJ needs to have a pretty good idea of what is going to work with what, and the genre distinctions are in large part defined along such lines. (They can get relatively technical too: BPM speeds, the placing of the kick or snare drum, the collection of drum samples used, etc - all these are built into a genre's definition and help the DJ in his mixing.) The same goes for listeners: they want a relatively unbroken sequence of music of a similar type to dance to - that's why they went to this club not that one.

Artists who work in more than one genre at a time often use different pseudonyms for the different areas of their work - again, a way of identifying, pre-audition, what sort of thing to expect.

Thanks hugely for all of that, trj. This may be the subject for a different thread, but the issue makes me wonder about possible parallels within the 'classical' field (or even whether it is necessarily so wrong to call 'classical' a genre in its own right, as it is sometimes perceived from without) - there is a lot of antipathy towards generic groupings in contemporary classical, such as minimalism, spectral music, New Complexity, and so on, but might the discursive adoption of such terms (as exists, though rarely unapologetically) have any positive benefits as well, perhaps from the point of view of listeners rather than those who write/play the music?

A thought that just occurred to me: maybe these genre categorisations particularly act to the benefit of the less central members of perceived stylistic/generic movements - would some people have been as likely to encounter the music of some of the lesser-known composers associated with New Complexity, or Fluxus, or whatever (and, perhaps even more significantly, would they have been written about) if they had only been known as isolated, atomised, individual composers?

Thanks for all that, trj, I hadn't got my thoughts together on that material in anything like such a logical way. I'm quite fascinated by all the pseudonymity (is that a word?) that goes on in dance music, which is clearly related to what goes on in internet forums such as this one, but I hadn't previously understood how "functional" it is, how integral to the identity of the music, in a way that the external imposition of the idea of "schools" of (notated) composition isn't.

Apart from what you have to say in your post, though, I think another factor is that these categorisations might be supposed to help people negotiate their way through a musical landscape which is more diverse and navigable than at any previous time in history (as Ruby implies). The danger is that they might also discourage "experimental listening", particularly to musics which don't easily fit into whatever the prevailing subdivisions are. On the other hand, they (and the pseudonyms) could be said to refocus the attention away from the "artist" (in the received sense) and back onto the music. The dance music scene might in some ways be a more appropriate and viable model for the future of "new music" than the one based on composer and performer "personalities" inherited from previous generations.  Varèse famously said "the present-day composer refuses to die!" but maybe the present he was talking about is now in the past.

Yes indeed. This has also been a (necessary) feature of improvised music of course, given that it doesn't consists of "works" in the way that other forms of composition do, and I find it interesting to see the extent to which the dividing lines between electronic improvisation and IDM have dissolved, the difference often being simply between something performed live and something composed in recorded form, and in fact that difference too can be deceptive.

I think this is probably true in the case of new music, and almost certainly the case with the sort of dance music we're talking about (although I should add I'm an interested observer, rather than an especially knowledgeable participant, so I might well be wrong on some of what I say here). The difference, as I see it, is that a lot of artists and/or monikers don't have terribly long creative lives - they might only produce a couple of 12" singles and then never be heard of again. Or, to put it better:


The 'prestige', or the cultural value, attaches much more to the music track than to the artist: if you are attracted to a particular track you are (I believe) just as likely to chase down other things in that particular sub-genre as you are things by that artist (who may not even have produced anything else). This is a very different model of relations between listener/consumer and artist and musical product than what is typical for other musical genres.

Whether it is or could be applied to new music, that's possible. To some small extent it is - I've certainly bought CDs on the strength of them being on particular label (Kairos, Metier, col legno, etc) in which the label stands in as a certain genre indicator (as it often does in dance music - see Warp, Planet Mu, ffrr, etc)


That's certainly true - there is a feedback loop that needs to be unpicked. I think that the idea of innovation tending to happen in clusters still holds within that though. so a breakthrough artist might be associated with a particular scene/club night, around which a whole load of activity happens and it's that that essentially births a new genre - cf FWD>> and dubstep - the media attention will choose a particular focus, but there'll be lots of associated music going on below the radar.


I wouldn't say that, but I would suggest that the DJ has taken some of the role of cultural arbiter away from the artist. The artist still creates, but it's the DJ who determines its cultural 'implementation' as it were (although they're often the same person of course).

Although of course, as mentioned much earlier, the internet has changed things a lot. DJs in clubs or on the radio don't have such a monopoly on exposure any more since it's so incredibly easy to listen to samples via YouTube etc (well not on this PC but that's by the by).

Phew. I thought I'd heard FWD>> being referred to as a genre. Maybe not.