The 2010s were weird.I think Ive mentioned this to you before but in my opinion the last 2/3 years of Trance have show increased promise and quality.
At the beginning of the decade you had the JOOF Essential Mix, and the modern tech-trance style was also developing - you can tell from JOC's productions around this time. Shortly after, around 2011 producers perfected the tech-trance style, and then there was the no-climax, full acid non-sense for a few years. Trance also started drawing influences from big room, but it largely avoided dubstep (only a few trance tracks with dubstep-like sounds were ever released, think Photographer - This is Upstep). In the background, JOOF Recordings and Solarstone struggled to keep things real and underground.
This time also saw the loss and/or deterioration of former trance stars: Tiesto quickly latched on "trouse," officially quitting trance. M.I.K.E. largely lost his unique touch. Several other producers came out of retirement to release unremarkable tracks.
I think this era of trance culminated in the Transmission 2014 event at Prague. Pretty much the entire lineup consists of key players from this era, even more so than any other early 2010s year.
Beyond that, you have the dark era led by Vini Vici and Armin capitalizing on the psytrance. They thought it'd be a great idea to combine trance with the most boring psy-trance style (modern full-on), and the crazy thing is that it worked. Vini Vici's Free Tibet has ~107 million views at the time of writing, and Armin's Blah Blah Blah [2018] has well over 400 million views. Blah Blah Blah is like a chimera of trance genres; the combination of psytrance with pop vocals and a big room arrangement doesn't really work. It still became immensely popular.
Recently there has been an uptick in quality. I think that's thanks to Anjuna stepping up their game, both on the main label and Anjunadeep.
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