Unpopular opinions

[Chordata]

I don't know how unpopular this really is, but I continue to find it a shame that scantraxx missed the boat on techno. So much hardstyle-adjacent music could have been under a scantraxx sublabel. I think a lot of new fans find scantraxx very weak (they are mostly on gearbox related music), of course they are setting 13 year olds' spotify homepages on fire by releasing compilations so that's a big no-no, and generally I do get a feeling the labels are not 'driving' a substantial part of the scene as in the past.

I always thought Fusion would have been even better off pivoting from its quasi-talent label status now and embracing the early-hardstyleish techno sound, as it’s actually somewhat close to those earliest fusion releases anyway. I imagined Zany returning to something close to his 2002 sound and when I’m really daydreaming even imagined a southstylers release or two.

[battlejellyfish]

Unpopular - whilst the OG Raw sound itself is cool, need to be careful that it doesn't just settle into one particular vibe and not use all the various sounds within the initial raw years of 09-12

I'm afraid that's how it usually goes when revisiting older styles of hardstyle. when I hear something classic hardstyle related it's most of the time inspired by Josh & Wesz or Wildstylez because I think their styles are the most accessible, recogniseable and popular form of melodic classic hardstyle the larger audience knows in terms of vibes and not other guys so I don't see why it's going to be different at returning back to classic raw

[ceero]

Scantraxx could have jumped that hypetrain, Zany could have jumped that train, frankly so many artists who used to make amazing early hardstyle who try hard and struggle to remain relevant to modern hardstyle could have jumped on that train.... and be actually succesfull with it. This scene has the knowhow how to make quality early hardstyle, which is something majority of the techno scene lacks.

But the problem here is that, I feel that this scene has simply abandoned early hardstyle, long time ago. I mean just look at all the 'classics' and 'oldskool' parties - good luck hearing stuff older than 2007-8 there. Look at the 'best of' compilations, like The Prophet's hardstyle archive or the new DBSTF compilation. Effectively zero pre-2008 tracks. Hardstyle scene simply pretends the early hardstyle period did not happen, whats considered to be the genre classics by most of the fanbase is stuff from late 00's/early 10's, whatever happend before that doesnt exist, and that is not just the thing with nowadays hardstyle scene, thats something that has been constantly happening for years. Zany & The Beholder - Midnight was voted to be the best hardstyle track of all time in i think 2010ish on the old GHF forum that had like 30k users (and that was fucking huge amount of members for an online community back then). What do you think, how many people who listen to hardstyle these days even know that track? I wouldn't put my money on that number being too high.

I mean, it's not hard to see why - the shift to early/nustyle was, in my opinion, just as drastic as the transformation the scene has gone through over the past 2-3 years. Back then, many early fans left the scene and abandoned the music because of how much it changed, while newcomers didn’t really care for the classic stuff - which, once again, is exactly what we’re seeing happen today.

The only bright exception here are TNT and to some extent Zatox - all glory to them. Oh yeah, and then there's Activator who went full on here, but directly caters to the techno crowd, because he understood that the hardstyle scene of these days probably doesnt even remember that this is what hardstyle used to sound like. I mean there was this one raw dj who's name i forgot who said he played The Prophecy in his set and unironically got shit in his DMs for playing crappy verknipt techno music

[ThePrincipal]

ceero, Early HS was abandoned in 2010