Erol Alkan speaks on dance music’s double-edged sword

Following last week’s comments from Tiesto about the advent of file sharing leading to the boom in popularity for dance music in recent years, inthemix users kicked off a rather interesting debate about the state of the production industry in 2011 and whether the deluge of new music available to listeners was good for artist growth or if it had a negative effect on overall quality of the output.

As if he was himself reading the comments, UK don and ITMer favourite Erol Alkan spoke out on the subject in a recent interview with This Is Fake DIY and had plenty to say about the open floodgates of the modern dance landscape.

“The strength has been how easy and quickly you can buy dance music now, but that has also lead to its weakness,” Alkan asserted. “There just seems to be so much of it at the moment, and a problem has been how fast music can appear, get played out and then [be] discarded within weeks.”

While he’s embraced all digital forms as a DJ, Alkan continued his point and was mournful of the impact that digital retailers and illegal downloads have had on physical record stores and the inherent joys of shopping in them.

“The notion of record shopping has also depleted and that is quite sad,” he said. “I still buy records on a weekly basis, but I think many people new to dance music may never get to experience the joys of crate digging.”

While there are convincing arguments on both sides we reckon Erol’s words hit pretty close to the bone. Keep the discussion rolling in the comment section below.