What was the reason for the decline of trance after 2005?

sadyk

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A class "A" example of this is Enhanced Recordings. Just look back at their discography, even all the way through 2010, they had nothing but bangers. But now? One big-room track after another, and the change didn't happen gradually but rather: BOOM, BIG-ROOM FROM HERE ON OUT!

Blame it on Tritonal taking over the label. :(
I instantly found myself unfollowing them on every channel back then. Even their artists radically changed their sound: Juventa, Estiva, Stonevalley etc.
 

Katadunkass

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Blame it on Tritonal taking over the label. :(
I instantly found myself unfollowing them on every channel back then. Even their artists radically changed their sound: Juventa, Estiva, Stonevalley etc.
Yeah, it's such a shame - my God they changed!
 

dmgtz96

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One interesting to note is that big room technically didn't exist until late 2011, which is well after the commonly-cited period of 2007-2008.
Electro-house and progressive house might have played roles in the decline, but one genre that we've overlooked is "trouse." Tiesto and co. latched onto that genre fairly quickly (it was much, much more commercial), and it was essentially an early form of big room.
 

brandonl

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Big events are not what killed trance. there are so many trance events from the 90's and 2000's that had huge numbers of people attend (sensation white and black for example). Sensation had like 50,000 people an event. it's the commercialization and the subsequent decline in production quality that led to it's downfall.
 
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dmgtz96

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Big events are not what killed trance. there are so many trance events from the 90's and 2000's that had huge numbers of people attend (sensation white and black for example). Sensation had like 50,000 people an event. it's the commercialization and the subsequent decline in production quality that led to it's downfall.

Correct. Another thing that people liked to cite was "Americanization." In the old forum, people blamed the US for the demise of trance, but it hasn't been mentioned on this thread. That leads me to think that trance's introduction to the US market was not that important. Now, I am no authority on this matter, but in my opinion trance was just never "big" in the US. The US had its own things going on like rap, and it welcomed big room with open arms, but ultimately trance was never a money driver in this part of the world. Here is a good Quora answer on why trance never became popular there.
You could argue that US capitalist ideals caused producers to shift away from trance into big room to make more money, but that's more like an indirect reason of the decline imo. After all, it was the producers that shifted away.
 
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Hensmon

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There were many great tracks released after 2006. Sunny Lax - Blue Bird (2007), Aurora (2009) and Misgrey (2009) comes to mind.

No denying there has been great Trance released after 2005, but the scene did start to loose the magic i think, in a more general sense. Less quality coming out and more shit being made and that trend seemed to increase as time went on.
 
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Magdelayna

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This was my 'best of 2007' mix....for me Trance never declined massively in any year - there was always gems released.



01 Tiesto - Ten Seconds Before Sunrise
02 Chris Lake feat. Emma Hewitt - Carry Me Away
03 First State - Falling
04 Jonas Steur feat. Jennifer Rene - Fall to Pieces
05 Tiesto feat. Christian Burns - In The Dark (Trance mix)
06 DJ Shah - Who Will Find Me
07 Dogzilla - Frozen (Dub mix)
08 ATB - Feel Alive (Duderstadt mix)
09 Mark Otten vs. Carrie Skipper - Time is Serene (Armin Mash-Up)
10 INXS - Afterglow (Randy Boyer & Eric Tadla mix)
11 Six Senses pres. Xposure - Niagra (Aly & Fila mix)
12 Stoneface & Terminal - Supernature (Guiseppe Ottaviani mix)
13 Lost Witness vs. Sassot - Whatever (Aly & Fila mix)
14 Above & Beyond - Home (Club mix)
15 Aly & Fila pres. A & F Project - Ankh (Breath of Life)


You could say track number 3 was a pivotal one in style - the first one where the drop went into just a kick and not carrying on the melody - starting off a massive trend with future tracks,which a lot of people didnt like.
 
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deVOID

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01 Tiesto - Ten Seconds Before Sunrise
02 Chris Lake feat. Emma Hewitt - Carry Me Away
03 First State - Falling
04 Jonas Steur feat. Jennifer Rene - Fall to Pieces
05 Tiesto feat. Christian Burns - In The Dark (Trance mix)
06 DJ Shah - Who Will Find Me
07 Dogzilla - Frozen (Dub mix)
08 ATB - Feel Alive (Duderstadt mix)
09 Mark Otten vs. Carrie Skipper - Time is Serene (Armin Mash-Up)
10 INXS - Afterglow (Randy Boyer & Eric Tadla mix)
11 Six Senses pres. Xposure - Niagra (Aly & Fila mix)
12 Stoneface & Terminal - Supernature (Guiseppe Ottaviani mix)
13 Lost Witness vs. Sassot - Whatever (Aly & Fila mix)
14 Above & Beyond - Home (Club mix)
15 Aly & Fila pres. A & F Project - Ankh (Breath of Life)

Would you care to post the Soundcloud link please? :) Aly and Fila were on fire back then.
 

Arnoud

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Trance just needs to go back to little clubs with 50 - 150 people on the floor, more atmosphere, not so many hands in the air moments, it will be good again, now everybody wants to be played at massive events, can't be so much quility in that

Maybe Corona will make that happen :ROFLMAO:
 

dmgtz96

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03 First State - Falling

You could say track number 3 was a pivotal one in style - the first one where the drop went into just a kick and not carrying on the melody - starting off a massive trend with future tracks,which a lot of people didnt like.

I remember that trend in early 2010s tech-trance. It was really bad. It basically made tech-trance not worth listening to, as there was no pay-off.
Thankfully Will Atkinson "kept it real," and even Askew deviated from that formula for Shine.
 

Propeller

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To me it's all quite simple really. Even the late 90's trance was much more commercial and formulaic compared to the early 90's. And, that was due to the popularity of clubs like Gatecrasher, Cream, huge number of mix CD's out on the market, radio shows where DJs played mostly trance, large legal festivals, etc. A lot of people who listened to trance in the early 90's complained that trance was dead by the late 90's and hated that more modern sound.

Commercial forces and $$ drove many producers to make a more cheesy formulaic sound. Ferry Corsten was a pioneer of this type of trance, and whether you like him or not there's no denying that 99.9% of his late 90's sound had similar structure: build up, breakdown, massive hand in the air riff, etc. And this was the kind of trance that packed out clubs and festivals, sold mix CDs by the ton and catapulted trance records like Gouryella, etc. into the pop charts.

Now in the 2000's this all went next level when Tiesto played his first solo gig in May 2003. Producers and DJs realised how much more money they could make by putting on massive solo stadium shows. After Tiesto, other producers steadily followed suit, most notably Armin and Above & Beyond. The latter two acts became particularly powerful players in the scene due to Armin and his company buying up so many other smaller trance labels in the digital era. A&B obviously had Anjunabeats, etc. and the radio shows increased their audience and popularity and the money flowed in steadily. The music itself became more and more commercial sounding to please the ever growing crowds of followers. Pandering to the most common denominator and all that.

Now, this was the kind of trance a lot of the newer producers grew up with so they followed suit and made the kind of trance that would be played by their heroes. This was no longer trance in my opinion, it gradually morphed into electronic pop music. EDM explosion was just a natural consequence of the mass commercialization of the whole dance music scene. Play to ever bigger crowds, make ever more commercial, bleepy music to cater to shorter attention spans and keep everyone happy by giving them the type of music they could easily "get". I.e. pop music.

Now this pop-trance is far away from the type of trance with quality track structure, the feel of a journey, melodies and atmosphere. However, that's not to say that quality trance ever died. I strongly disagree with anyone who says that trance died after this year or that or that the quality of music decreased. In fact, I think that real trance has only become better over the years. There are still lots of producers, DJs and labels that release good quality trance. It's just that this is far out numbered by the commercial trance which gives the impression that there in no quality music out there and trance is dead and an irrelevance.

The scene nowadays is a lot more fragmented than ever before. Everyone and their dog has their own radio show, new releases come like a deluge due to DAWs and a huge number of record labels. All it takes is a little bit of research, perseverance and digging around to find the quality stuff. And, it is well worth it.
 
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Archon

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While I essentially agree with you in almost every way there, @Propeller, but if people who always said that quality trance is still there, just takes a little bit of digging to find shared what they found, I think I'd actually believe in that statement.

Granted, every year there are a lot of great releases, but I don't actually remember those in a year or two. They are not that special. Maybe it's just my taste, but I come back to music from the earlier years. There are exceptions with newer stuff (Eco's album from 2011), but mostly it's just old stuff. Something with emotion, personality, distinctness, meaning...
 
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dmgtz96

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Here's a recent post from Tranceaddict's SYSTEM J. I thought it was insightful about what happened (online) to trance past 2010.

To be honest, TA's activity levels have been steadily on the slide since around that time [2006-2010], which is basically when trance firmly exited stage left as being any kind of vaguely cool or relevant genre. Deprived of new recruits, the entire trance scene consists of the same generation of clubbers from the early '00s who've steadily got older and have either retired or whose tastes have predictably matured.

There was a very brief revival around here from 2010-2013 when J00F's Essential Mix got people excited that good trance might still be out there, but despite some concerted effort all-round the "trance revival" never took off for the same reasons: no new recruits, no wider interest.

The irony now is that thanks to techno DJs playing old '90s tunes, 18 year olds are actually interested in unabashed trance again. However, that demographic has nothing to do with the moribund trance scene. It's a techno crowd.

SYSTEM J is one of the last regular users on Tranceaddict, which at one point was among the largest trance forums along with trance.nu and the old trancefix forum.
 

dmgtz96

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It's amazing this forum is still active. Isn't that forum like older than the entire known Universe?
😂😂
I think they've been active since the late '90s/early 2000s. I don't know how or why it's still alive.
TA was an interesting place. From what I gathered, a lot of the early folk were juvenile, which is why there were so many heated discussions and substantial hostility back in the day. People that raved about (pun intended) classic trance argued with those who liked anthem trance, and of course there were the infamous threads with Markus Schulz, Deadmau5, and Dave Dresden. TA also went through a period where it picked on "mcprog," and after 2005 a lot of users went on a deep/minimal techno phase.
 

Nerio

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If the decline was in 2005 or 2006-7-8 it is easy to find out. Just make tracklist of great trance songs from these years , and you will se the decline start in 2005.ň
I have one tracklist and to the year 2004 number of trance songs are climbing (2003: 161 songs, 2004: 162)
After 2004 in 2005: 81 songs.
 
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dmgtz96

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If the decline was in 2005 or 2006-7-8 it is easy to find out. Just make tracklist of great trance songs from these years , and you will se the decline start in 2005.ň
I have one tracklist and to the year 2004 number of trance songs are climbing (2003: 161 songs, 2004: 162)
After 2004 in 2005: 81 songs.

We actually saw that in the classics section from the old forum. Although I can't recall specific numbers (because that was so long ago), I remember that the number of threads for classics decreased dramatically from 2004 to 2005. Admittedly, many people (myself included) posted tracks from 2004 because they were from 2004, but even if you got rid of those "extra" tracks I think we would have seen a sharp decline anyways.
It's great that you bring that up. 2005, 2006, 2007, and even 2008-2010 had a decent amount of quality tracks, but the volume of releases (which I mentioned in the original post!) kept decreasing. Claiming that "there were still many good releases in 2007-2008" doesn't add to the discussion, and it was not my intent to claim that those years didn't have good trance releases.
 
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