Dance Music

Dance music is music composed, played, or both, specifically to accompany social dancing. It can be either the whole musical piece or part of a larger musical arrangement.

Dance music includes a huge variety of music, including traditional dance music such as Irish traditional music, waltzes, rock and roll, country music and tangos. An example of traditional dance music in the United States is the old-time music played at square dances and contra dances.

In the Baroque period, the major dance styles were noble court dances, which were often derived from folk dances. Examples include the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue.

In the Classical music era, the minuet gained dominance, usually as a third movement in four-movement non-vocal works such as sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies. The waltz also arose later in the Classical era, as the minuet evolved into the scherzo (literally, "joke"; a faster-paced minuet). Both remained part of the Romantic music period, which also saw the rise of various other dance forms like the barcarolle, mazurka, and polonaise.

The 20th century saw the rise of more dance forms, often jazz-based or -related, such as the ragtime. As 20th century classical music headed toward more dissonant and non-traditional directions with tonality, popular genres began to take up the need for dance music, and produced numerous duple and quadruple dance forms.

From the late 1970s, the term dance music has come to also refer (in the context of nightclubs) more specifically to electronic music offshoots of rock and roll, such as disco, house, techno and trance. Generally, the difference between a disco, or any dance song, and a rock or general popular song is that in dance music the bass hits "four to the floor" at least once a beat (which in 4/4 time is 4 beats per measure), while in rock the bass hits on one and three and lets the snare take the lead on two and four (Michaels, 1990).

Dance Pop

Dance-pop is a style of dance music that grew out of disco in the mid-1980s. Complete with pounding, dance-club beats, the songs of this music are more fully-formed when it comes to the structure of the lyrics compared to pure dance music. It's a producer's medium first and foremost, since he or she songwrites and builds the tracks, then chooses the right vocalist to sing the song. There have been a few exceptions naturally, since several dance-pop artists such as Janet Jackson and Madonna took control of the direction and sound of their records. But even when divas like them become stars, the artistic vision is still the producer's. Dance-pop is music that's about image more importantly than it is about substance. In other words, the lyrics don't matter as much as the rhythms.