When you say Trance you do mean.. Trance trance, right? Like the Trance which hasn’t been mainstream for nearly a decade, whilst the Top 40 is peppered with DnB/Dubstep? Trance was finished off in the mainstream when Prog House came along and everyone jumped on the bandwagon.
The reason there’s so many DnB tracks, free or otherwise, is that the underground scene was bustling even when Trance was at it’s peak, and now it’s gone away at the same time that it’s never been cheaper to make electronic music, it’s guaranteed to get a crap ton of tracks. The only genre I know of that has more free shit (and by no means good shit) is Dubstep (which is still DnB, really) and the current Hard Prog House.
I find trance to be very commercial nowadays. Not commercial as in top 40. Commercial as in sold out to the “evil empire”. DnB to me still has that underground feel to it still.
But this is a huge tangent from my initial question…
Well if you release it for free, you’re going to lose a lot of money on it, on the other hand you’re going to get a lot more coverage out of it. Also, if you use samples that you don’t have the rights for, giving a track away for free is usually a good way to avoid a lawsuit (although it can still happen if they argue that your career was built on the success of a track with their sample. It HAS happened before.) When you’re big time/household name though, there’s no need to give away a track for free, you’d be doing yourself a massive disservice.
I’m amazed at how many up-and-coming nu-disco artists give away their music for free on Soundcloud. It makes perfect sense, because it’s an excellent promotional tool. But yeah, tons of free music. We are living in a golden age.
Dubstep is dnb? I don’t even know what that means.
A lot of tunes in dnb are free because the artist can’t sell enough copies to clear samples. Instead of letting tunes rot on HD’s, they give them away.