All respect to John, a legend in my eyes, but is he really someone you should take track advice on at this stage in his taste? I had to stop listening to JOOF radio, my favorite show of all time, due to how life-less everything became, and I know others in this forum feel the same. It's a fair point to say his music label became 80% boring and uninteresting.
I don't agree with what they sign on JOOF Recordings in like 70% of cases and I'm always the first to trash them about it in personal messages.
Take a look at the underground scene on soundcloud and bandcamp and it feels full of life and new ideas.
Well, I listen to a lot of music every week when I'm looking for the tunes for my radio show, I always check Bandcamp-exclusive releases and what people post here at Trancefix forum. The type of sound you're talking about is not resonating with me, and there's nothing you can do about it. Majority of people prefer the positive/happy side of Trance (Chicane's style for example) with the major keys/chords/gammas, and I never liked a single track from Chicane. That doesn't mean his music is bad or he's been taking a bad advice from his colleagues. It's a matter of taste. He's got millions of followers, which talks for itself.
Let me reveal a secret for you, positive music gets 70% more plays from the listeners and much more downloads from the DJs on Beatport, as most people want to get positive emotions and vibrations when they take their headphones on. My soul is immune to the positive side of music and it only responds to melancholy and minor keys and melodies (there are extremely rare cases when I like a summer-esque sounding track). That's how I was built.
I also noticed people are happy to see the trend for the faster-paced Trance (145+ BPM), well, I don't get that.
I take advice from a few key producers in my inner circle, but what (and how) I produce is still what I actually want to do, not what others want to hear. I listen to every single track or remix of mine hundreds of times before the release as I'm really happy with the result, every time. This is all that matters. If people don't like it, it's absolutely OK!
me too bro. I will play all the episodes up to 2016 and then something kind of switched and like a gradual creep a lot of Trance left and the prog is just not me liking. I love prog music as much as the next 4/4 head, but something about the JOOF brand where it all sounds the same and does not have any excitement or groove like the old prog. I would call it slow melodic techno or deep prog, but not deep trance.