The crowd controls the buttons: The evolution of music is a bottom-up process.

Producers like Rebellion, Level One, Malice and Geck-o and Labels like Gearbox and Spoontech, just to name a few, are continuously looking to expand the boundaries of conventional Hardstyle. It seems as if this exploration of the outer realms; a process of continuously looking for a harder and/or new sound, is starting to clamp its tentacles tighter and tighter around the scene. This process is all for the good as Hardstyle nowadays is diverse as ever. However, we endlessly and falsely look at producers and labels as the origin for the expanding boundaries and growing variety in the Hardstyle music industry; as if it is some sort of top-down process. We should adjust this view. Rather than credit the top (producers and labels) for enlarging the aesthetics of the bottom (the crowd), the bottom should be praised for stimulation the top to come up with more sophisticated sounds, harder kicks, and fresh ideas. The evolution of music is a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, process.

“So.. uuhm.. what!?” Let me clarify myself with an example of why producers in the studio and labels aren’t responsible for Hardstyle’s growing variety, but the people on the dancefloor are – the fans. This year, for the second time, Decibel Outdoor Festival had an ‘Extreme Loudness’ stage – the name already entailing that DJs on this stage would take the raw side of Hardstyle to the next level. In 2015 B2S opened the Extreme Loudness stage at Decibel Outdoor Festival and immediately the relatively small stage became overflown by people. As a logical consequence, this year’s stage was built larger so there was more room for people to enjoy the excruciatingly loud kicks. And guess what? Just like last year, it turned out to be a big success! Producers like Regain, Rebellion and Unresolved made the crowd go crazy, and just as the year before, the stage was packed from the first minutes till dark…

In contrast to the growing extreme loudness stage, the euphoria stage at Decibel is rapidly decreasing in size. Less and less people made the choice to attend this stage, forcing Decibel to shrink the size of the stage. Therefore the question arises: is it Decibel who forces people to listen to more extreme styles by enlarging the extreme loudness stage (top-down)? Or is it the crowd who forces Decibel to expand and/or shrink certain stages (bottom-up)? I believe I’ve made my point that the crowd is forcing the organisation to adjust their course, and not the organisation calling the shots on what’s hot.

So how does this top-down/bottom-up dichotomy occur in the evolving of the Hardstyle music per se? Let me again turn to the extreme loudness stage. Whatever DJ was playing during that day, the crowd was only demanding one thing: nasty and MTF***** loud kicks. The more the DJs played tracks with over the top kicks, the more the crowd went mental. So you can understand that not the DJ with the most balanced set, but the DJ with the hardest kicks was most celebrated that day. The crowd was thus causing DJs to play more and more brutal tracks with extreme kicks.

Simultaneously, as the crowd are strongarming DJs to play tracks with extreme kicks, producers will end up in the studio creating similar brutal tracks with these components as these tracks are most likely to be played at festivals. If DJs know that the crowd is more likely to go mental to this kind of music, then they are kind of forced to make it… Yes, you may read that sentence again and note that it is not about who started the process, but about who controls it. It is the voice of the masses – the bottom – that moves the producers (the top) and not the other way around.

So why is the adjustment of a top-down-view in a bottom-up-view important? Our style is evolving as speedy Gonzales on a pep-overdose, causing some fans to long for further progress and others left craving a time when Hardstyle was less ‘complicated.’ These complimenting or blaming fingers point constantly to producers and labels as the cause for the evolving of our style. However, the evolving of our music is not top-down directed.

We, the crowd, the fans, are in charge of the evolving of our music. We should therefor credit ourselves for the evolving of the style, but we should also be critical about the music we are listening to, as we control the buttons of the evolving of our style.