How can we possibly think that there’s less demand at the festival for dance music – which is what they’ve been doing well for nearly a decade now? And it’s a problem that the festival wants nothing to do with: it only shows the demand for dance when they go out of their way to promote it.
It can be argued that in the past ten years, the festival has become less interested in promoting dance music – but I disagree. In 2009, they had more ‘dance’ entries than any other year in the festival’s history. If you look back at the festival’s top ten dance entries of each year, it’s hard to say that they lost out on it at all on the back of a big festival year.
Why were the songs not on the bill?
I would say that the reason that there are less ‘dance’ submissions this year has more to do with just that – the lack of demand for it from the crowd. It’s interesting to see that the same number of people have responded to it as they have to the Radio 1 DJs’ submissions. So it might seem as if the music is already there; just that the audience is not keen to listen in. To see that not happen again is a huge victory for the festival: they’ve shown that there is a demand for it, and that the crowd at Glastonbury will go through every night of the week and give it a go.
For those who don’t know, the submissions were given by a panel made up of industry professionals. There were DJs and music journalists for the most part on the panel. They were given a list of the songs that were submitted, plus a setlist that they had been asked in a previous year to submit. There were also music writers who were brought on to read the submission. To give some more context, the majority of submissions come from the UK; most of which only receive a very few days of notice. So if you’re on the festival’s list, you can start listening right away.
What else is new this year?
There are some great new bands, of course, and some that we’ve really missed so much this year. But even though the music this year is still a pretty decent showcase of British dance music, there were some more diverse artists than last year. This year you also have some amazing bands that I wouldn’t have expected in a year so long ago: I’m thinking the Pixies, The Black Dog, D
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