ease of communication.


yes i know that techno is a subgenre of electronic dance music, but when your discussing music with people what term do you use. if you say "i like EDM" to most people theyre like "what?". you could say "electronic music", but that encompasses much more than just edm. you could say "electronic dance music" but that's such a big mouthful and people are usually still like "what?". i used to use the word "electronica" but that is more of a miscellanious subgenre now rather than the all encompassing term it was created to be, plus its a mouthful to say to and not everyone knows what it is. "dance" covers far more than EDM.

if you use the word "techno", pretty much everyone knows you're talking about the kind of music you hear in clubs. if you're talking with someone who knows about EDM then they'll usually say "what kind of techno do you like" and you can get more specific, house, jungle, breaks, trance, techno, etc. only anal people will get in your face and be like "it's not called techno it's called EDM, techno is a style of EDM".

so yes i know techno is a style of electronic dance music, but for ease of communication, i'll use the word techno.

what do you all think?

same here.

I do that too, but if you go into a club today, it seems that people associate the term "dance music" with hiphop these days. If you look into the dance music section of some music download services, you will see quite a bit of a mishmash there including rap.

i never use the word techno.  It implys alot of ace of base and cheesy darudeish stuff.  I always say I listen to electronic music.  Pretty much eliminates them thinking i listen to anything resembling hiphop which i pretty much hate anyway.


doug

Guess I'm anal then.

 

no aesop rock?  no adeem?  no talib qweli?

yeah, you know, i rarely have issues when i tell people i work with electronic music, that seems to be a better catch all for me.  if i use techno, i've had more experiences of people automatically writing it off if i use techno.

I can totally see your point Joel, and how as an artist, setting up that pre-conception correctly would be super important to get people to actually give your music a chance and listen to it.  (Especially when it's so darn good! )

Words have so many different meanings attached to them, what is Techno to one guy is something totally different to another.  (I don't mean the literal genre style, just the general public's idea of what that word "means.")

I guess at the end of the day everyone just uses whatever words work best to try and describe the music they make, play, or enjoy in the best possible light.

It's definitely interesting and helpful to see the different ways people think about it, and the way some of you present it to avoid that.