"...Not only were sales of crossover-oriented electronica plummeting; the underground dance music sold in specialist record stores also declined. Some of those shops have closed because business is slow and record labels are suffering. "People I know who run labels keep getting worse and worse news," says William Linn, a San Francisco-based dance party promoter. "Partly it's because of the Internet, people just taking the music for free. But it's also because people aren't buying the stuff in the way they were when the music was a really new thing back in the early 90's." During that rave culture heyday, an underground anthem could sell anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 copies. Today, shifting a thousand copies of a 12-inch single is considered a good result. What happened? One cause is the continued fragmentation of dance culture into myriad micro-genres with narrow aesthetic parameters and niche followings. Another factor is musical overproduction, which effectively divides the pie into smaller slices. But the overall pie also seems to be shrinking as well. Dance music has simply lost the ear of the floating consumer. This may be, in part, a matter of fashion: electronic dance music had been around long enough to lose its "new kid on the subcultural block" status. The music had become familiar, and familiarity bred ennui." In the new millennium, the mainstream profile of dance music dipped alarmingly. This downturn occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was particularly precipitous in America, where electronica was edged off of the charts by the twin juggernauts of nu-metal and pop-punk, along with the perennial might of hip-hop. But it wasn't just a case of mass-media gatekeepers abandoning electronic music. Something was ailing at the grass roots of the scene. Formerly packed superclubs began to close, or move to smaller venues. Large raves, once the mainstay of dance culture, became nearly extinct. "Rave is dead in the Los Angeles area," says the West Coast scene watcher Dennis Romero, who is news editor at the dance magazine BPM. The central idea of electronic music's unwritten manifesto was always to surge full-tilt into the future. But in recent years many creators of dance music have been investigating the genre's own history, reworking ideas from electro, synthpop and Italodisco. Even more oddly, others have been looking to rock music for reinvigoration.

Ooh, but he does mention "The result is a growing hybrid genre, highlighted on the recent, excellent compilation "Shockout," known as "breakcore." Cool (I'm on that album !) : http://crucial-systems.com/2441/Shockout_Vol.1 My take is that its a much deeper phenomena: we are rushing into the future and MOST people don't want to deal with the unknowns. History and technology starts to speed up, and in response people look for something familiar to listen to. Or the "shock of the new" is finally passe; but then I'd expect some post-modern nuance, but most artists are playing it safe as the market gets tight. Which means its even more dull, and the market shrinks more.
Grime is kicking, but maybe it will get ignored just like jungle was (until it was already past its prime).
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