User:Brian G. Wilson/user/Club Music

Club music is a meta-genre term that includes many different genres of music that are played in nightclubs' environments for dancing, listening or relaxing.

It includes today the genres and styles of Ambient house, Ambient Techno, Breakbeat, Drum and bass, Downbeat, Dub, Hip Hop, House, Reggae, Synthpop, Techno, Trance and so on.

History
Discomusic's fad ended in late 1970s, so, beginning from early 1980s, DJs were used to play remixed versions of New Wave and Pop hits in nightclubs' heavily borrowing from the style and the techniques of American DJ and producer Tom Moulton. Early pop remixes were fairly simple; in the 1980s, "extended mixes" of songs were released to clubs and commercial outlets on 12-inch vinyl singles and often the cover sleeve reported the remixed version as "Club edit". These typically had a duration of 6 to 7 minutes, and often consisted of the original song with 8 or 16 bars of instruments inserted, often after the second chorus; some were as simplistic as two copies of the song stitched end to end. At the same time, the Detroit Techno scene began to influence the artists and DJs of the mid 1980s. The British band New Order were among the first to make available the Techno to the European audiences and dance floors, while contributing with sounds and techniques inspired from the German electronic scene of the 1970s. As the cost and availability of new technologies allowed, many of the bands who were involved in their own production (such as Depeche Mode and Duran Duran) experimented with more intricate versions of the extended mix. The Art of Noise took the remix styles to an extreme -- creating new music entirely using samples. Same techniques become widely used by the development of rap music into Hip Hop music The mid-1980s saw the arising of the first Hip Hop, House and Techno artists to achieve mainstream success.

Today
What is widely considered to be club music changes over time, it includes different genres depending on the region and who's making the reference. For example, as of 2006, hip hop music, being widely played in clubs, is one form of club music to many, but a smaller percentage of fans of British Techno fans state that Hip Hop and Reaggae are dead genres. Similarly, electronic dance music sometimes means different things to different people. Both terms vaguely encompass multiple genres, and sometimes are used as if they were genres themselves. The distinction is that club music is ultimately based on what's popular, whereas electronic dance music is a vague term that describes only the performing techniques and not the content, the themes, the styles and the cultural background of the music itself.