Dance music event blends business, fun

The dance-music world converges on Miami starting Saturday for the 19th annual Winter Music Conference, a 64-hour blowout with daily panels and exhibitions on dozens of topics related to electronic dance music, then nonstop DJ-spinning each night.

This year’s conference has joined forces with the Ultra Music Festival, which will serve as the opening event for the combined get-together, with sets by the Chemical Brothers, Paul Oakenfold, Paul van Dyk, John Digweed and other luminaries of the dance world.

Organizers say they’ll be using a 1-million-watt sound system to accommodate an anticipated turnout of 40,000 to 50,000 people for the festival, which is open to the public.

Another highlight figures to be the collaboration between Van Dyk, Moby and Perry Farrell on March 9 for the DanceStar USA-American Dance Music Awards. Calling themselves Precision Guided Musicians, they’ll offer a new electronic version of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Other performers include Blue Man Group, the Crystal Method, Yoko Ono and Boy George.

During the more sedentary parts of the conference, panels will address a couple of the key topics facing dance music today: what its place is in radio or retail, reflecting the larger issue of whether there’s life for dance music outside the nightclub.

“In our stores that have a dance specialist who really knows the product, it still does extremely well,” says Tower Records’ Southwest region director Bob Feterl. “The ones that just have it all in one A-Z bin don’t do as well. There are so many different types, so many subcategories, and a lot of it is imports, you need that kind of person who really lives it, goes to the clubs, reads all about it and gets the import magazines.”

Superstars such as Madonna who release dance remixes help the whole genre, Feterl says, but he notes that fewer such remixes are being released commercially today compared with five or six years ago, when many in the record industry were looking to dance music to break through to a mass audience.

“As far as a lot of retailers are concerned, it’s still more of a niche market,” Feterl says. “It’s more of an underground thing” keyed to “the Internet, world of mouth and [specialty] magazines. It’s not really radio-driven.

“But if we had one or two really great dance stations in town,” he added, “obviously that would make a huge difference.”

-- Randy Lewis