Petition to Rename "A State of Trance" to Reflect its Shift from Traditional Trance Music

[Julian Del Agranda]

trance isn't changing because ASOT is, ASOT is changing because trance is.

I think you underestimate how small the trance scene is. They simply need to follow trends because trance itself is too small for them to maintain the big company that Armada is. Solarstone and his wife do it all by themselves. There's no "company". And he is quite a big name for trance, right? Activa has a fulltime job. Like most trance deejays these days. Manuel Le Saux posted last year that he had zero gigs in a year. Sorry Gijs, but trance is really, really small.

ASOT is changing because the audience changes. Then trance changes as producers attempt to still stay relevent for ASOT and thus the "scene". And if you don't do that, then you will end up like almost any non-Armada-trance-artist: with another job besides music.

Now that all these non-ASOT-related artists have fulltime jobs.... and they are likely in an age with children and what not... they obviously don't have much time for their musical hobby-career. And thus.... less musical output, less (positive) innovation, less exposure, less gigs, less...

How I see it, trance really is nearly dead, apart from Armada (if you still count it as trance) who do whatever they can marketing-wise, to survive.

 

[Progrez]

I think you underestimate how small the trance scene is. They simply need to follow trends because trance itself is too small for them to maintain the big company that Armada is. Solarstone and his wife do it all by themselves. There's no "company". And he is quite a big name for trance, right? Activa has a fulltime job. Like most trance deejays these days. Manuel Le Saux posted last year that he had zero gigs in a year. Sorry Gijs, but trance is really, really small.

ASOT is changing because the audience changes. Then trance changes as producers attempt to still stay relevent for ASOT and thus the "scene". And if you don't do that, then you will end up like almost any non-Armada-trance-artist: with another job besides music.

Now that all these non-ASOT-related artists have fulltime jobs.... and they are likely in an age with children and what not... they obviously don't have much time for their musical hobby-career. And thus.... less musical output, less (positive) innovation, less exposure, less gigs, less...

How I see it, trance really is nearly dead, apart from Armada (if you still count it as trance) who do whatever they can marketing-wise, to survive.

So you are implying that we may as well change the name of this forum too and give the trance genre its funeral.

 

[Julian Del Agranda]

I have not a lot of problems with the idea of trance being a specific old type of music, that only a little group of nerds listens to.

I have not a lot of problems with the idea that only ‘hundreds’ of people listen to what I make. And not millions. I don’t like traveling, so a life as deejay isn’t for me anyway. Haha.

There’s a benefit of a small scene too: human connections. It’s fun to enjoy a track like Eneabba so much, when you back ‘n forth send messages to each other. It’s fun to see a LostLegend gain attention on Pure Trance (and even ASOT) with Running Man. Its worth more than reaching 10k streams or not.

 

[Parysatis]

only ‘hundreds’ of people listen to what I make ....

I listen to what you make.

 

[JohnnyBarefoot1992]

There's also one other thing I'd like to mention, which is that I believe cause and effect to be reversed here: trance isn't changing because ASOT is, ASOT is changing because trance is.

Take the rock genre in its entirety for example, most people (even below my age) consider bands like Queen and the Beatles, albums like the White Album and Dark Side of the Moon and songs like Bohemian Rhapsody and Smells Like Teen Spirit to be the best of all time. Despite this, you hear very little about rock nowadays even though the genre hasn't changed that much all those years. Society constantly changes and people look for new things and new experiences to listen to, meaning that eventually any genre which refuses to evolve will die out as people will just think it's more of the same.

Trance isn't an exception to this, people considered trance to be the biggest genre around near the end of the '90s and the beginning of the '00s until it wasn't anymore. It needed to change to stay relevant and as such, Armin included more progressive house, bigroom and techno in ASOT and his sets. He could have chosen not to do it, but then trance would've ended up as all those other genres of the 80s and 90s that people will look back on and say "man that was good, I wish they still made music like that today".

I think the reason for the demise of Rock was a mix of a lot of things happening, one of them was the fact that Electronic Music started to permeate itself big time in the Pop Music world already in the 80's, only to become stronger and stronger as time went by, to the point that at the certain point in our history pretty much any form of pop-music was more or less electronic (Dance-Pop, Hip-Hop, R&B, you name it) and even though I wouldn't say Rock Music didn't change that much at all over the course of the years it is also true that to a degree it somewhat stagnated and since Electronic Music appears to have more to offer people should kind of gave up a little bit on Rock Music, not completely, of course, but as a mainstream genre, for the most part, yeah, it's pretty much dead.

As for the Trance matter, I think Trance tried as best as possible to remain relevant and to a degree it was successful on that matter for only for a short while because by 2006 it was quite clear that Trance was no longer the big mainstream genre people were claiming it was and this was indeed when we actually saw Trance started taking a lot of inspiration from whatever kind of music was popular at its time: When Electro House was popular (2006-2009, more or less), lots of Electro-driven Trance tracks started to appear in the scene, when Minimal was popular (2009-2010, more or less) )lots of Minimal-infused Trance tracks came out, when Big Room/Anthem House was popular (2011-2012) lots of music like that, which was even Trancey to begin started to appear in Trance sets as well, when Big Room/Dirty Drop (However you wanna call it) was popular (2013-2014) lots of Trance tracks with such elements appear as well, now that Melodic Techno & Big Room Techno are popular Trance is starting to massively incorporate elements of such genres in it, so, in a way, Trance Music from 2006 and beyond has more or less been in trendwhorishy route which in a way I wouldn't necessarily call it a bad thing, after all, Uplifting Trance has such a predictable and at a certain point somewhat frustrating strict formula that at one time in your life you will want to do something different in order for you to survive and, let's face it, most post-2006 Uplifting Trance has been pretty much uneventful for the most part so in a way I kind of don't blame producers for experimenting a little bit with the formula itself, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.