Industrial and gothic music down the drain, electro music on the rise

Posted by: Hypno5ive on Jul 21, 09 | 5:54 pm

Good - the less popular it is, more likely that I will want to listen to it.

Posted by: LunaSlave on Jul 20, 09 | 4:16 pm

just noticed that there was a bit of a spike in searches for "gothic music" at the beginning of the last quarter of 2006, before it started to decline again...could that have something to do with the Dawson College shootings and the media falsely labelling Kimveer Gill as 'goth' simply because he had a Vampirefreaks account and listened to Ozzy Osbourne?

Posted by: whormongr on Jul 20, 09 | 11:34 am

duh.

Posted by: thornlab on Jul 18, 09 | 2:30 pm

How about charts on just plain good music?

Posted by: Side-Line on Jul 18, 09 | 12:10 pm

I repeat: 'electronic' is NOT included in these stats. It's pure keywords technically seen, not semantically.

Posted by: Lthrboots on Jul 18, 09 | 10:51 am

I have a feeling those stats might be because people start typing in "Electronic" and before they finish typing it in, the search engine shows results for "Electro".

As for the falling out of Goth and Industrial, people still use those terms, but a lot of fans are placing those categories under the term "Electro" even if they are not considered Electro.

If the term "Electro" is actually gaining momentum, then I am hoping places like iTunes and other music sites will put that category into their music listings. Right now, almost all of the Industrial/Goth?Darkwave/etc. genres are lumped into the term "Electronica". I hate that.

Posted by: EBM/DJ Skin on Jul 18, 09 | 9:24 am

As a radio programmer of an "Industrial" music show since 1997 and a follower of the Industrial music scene since 1987 with the likes of Skinny Puppy, NIN, Nitzer Ebb and more, I can agree there has been a dramatic shift in interest in the electronic music scenes in general. What was given commercial airplay on radio back in the late 80's has totally dissipated by the time late 90's developing an underground forum on the college radio circuit. And what was emergent in the college radio scene (electro music scene) in the 90's evolved into the commercial radio music industry in the early 21st century. From the early 80's we begin to see the development of new wave to industrial to generations of industrial/wave scenes to follow. And as an avid listener of both radio and concert music circuit I saw the shift of interest in scenes first hand! From CMJ charts to commercial top 40!
Yes i concur with these findings from my experiences in the radio and music scenes in general. Industrial music did get commercial interest at one point in history but that has now been shifted over to the electro music scenes now. Was nice though to tune into a commercial radio station to hear Nitzer Ebb or Skinny Puppy though!

Posted by: Neuroticpuppy on Jul 18, 09 | 8:38 am

at the end of the 80s, beginning of 90s everything electronic was also called Techno, and even that word isn't really representative. There's also Goth-industrial, and Goth electro, Cybergoth. and I hate the word Electronica, but that covers everything from Lounge, Chillout etc to Kraftwerk, and Prodigy, so I figure the graph is certainly fun to look at, but not sure if it really confirms a trend.
Perhaps it shows us what words are most used to define music genres at best.

Posted by: Endif on Jul 18, 09 | 5:38 am

Works for me: stay relevant, or fall by the wayside.

Posted by: yluko on Jul 17, 09 | 9:51 pm

Allot of searches could have nothing to do with our scene at all if we consider it separate from mainstream artists like Manson,NIN,Ramstien that have faded in mainstream popularity. As those bands aren't in their big heyday anymore their are allot less kids googling about industrial/gothic.

I think most of us have all met some people that consider themselves into gothic or industrial music who have never heard of any other band besides those three.

Posted by: HeathenHarvestSage on Jul 17, 09 | 8:14 pm

As discussed already, the word 'electro' covers a vastly wide area of music. Areas of music that continue to get broader with every new "Ground-breaking" artist. My beef with this article is that this discussion has been debated to death, really. We all know the various darker electronic genres have fallen off in recent years, even with the rise and success of fantastic labels like Tympanik Audio.

But really, roughly four paragraphs? That's all you had to say about this issue? I know the main point wasn't the rise of electro vs. dark electronics itself, but rather the fact that this graph was showing up on google, but still... From a journalistic standpoint, there was vastly more that could have been said about this and pondered.

I think the biggest point to make is that the darker genres of electronics have become so commercialized today that most have gotten bored with it and moved on. The rise of so many genres in the post-industrial scene is a perfect example -- one has to look no further than the increasing popularity of Neofolk and Neoclassical to see this.

Here's a poll for you:

How many cliché EBM tunes can you listen to in a row without either putting a bullet in your skull or finding something new to entertain you?

Posted by: Side-Line on Jul 17, 09 | 7:47 pm

'electronic music' is not included in this search graphic and neither are all the other terms you added, it are really precise 'search terms' that make this graphic. What is included is for instance: 'cool electro music', 'dark electro music' etc. but not different writings of the main keyword. It's technical, not semantic.

Posted by: leovleibnitz on Jul 17, 09 | 7:44 pm

sure, but if you look for electro music - what are you looking for then? electronika, electro industrial, electropop, electro house, or just electronic music in general from stockhausen to kraftwerk?

i think this is a stat that will not give any trend about where OUR SCENE is going. maybe this is only my own personal WISH, of course ;-)

and zeitgeist is a very nice tool to have fun with, BTW..

Posted by: Side-Line on Jul 17, 09 | 7:09 pm

I would not as such ditch the correlation between this and what people look on other sites.

If you say that people look for gothic music on other sites, even then, why would people for electro music search in the google search engin then?

The stats are what they are: search engin stats.

Posted by: leovleibnitz on Jul 17, 09 | 6:58 pm

i just wonder about the graph itself - what is that cryptic search volume index?? i guess this is only a relation to the total amount of searches in google - so to be honest: how many of you guys google your favourite band by "electro" or "industrial music" instead of searching it in relevant media, myspace or last.fm?????
;-)
i mean, the fact that greece is poleposition for gothic in keyword search shows, that there is still a HUGH demographic bias in people using internet access. and the graph is just showing some simple relations that basically say nothing about the trend in music:

if more older people using computer, they will most likely not search for "industrial music" or such stuff. but with they amount of 50+ internetusers in the past few years increased and the agegroup of 20-30 decreasing from 63% to 20% in (1995-2007), it is obvious why the relative "search volume index" just dropped.
this is how statistics shows you a picture, but the picture says nothing!!!

Posted by: nulldevice on Jul 17, 09 | 6:08 pm

I'd even wager that "electro" as a descriptor for "electro-industrial" or anything like that would barely be a blip on the google radar. It's not a usage that ever really caught on outside of a small niche. I certainly never heard it without the suffix "-industrial" except I think in one OffBeat press release. I also haven't really heard "electro-industrial" used since like 97.

Posted by: thethoughtcriminals on Jul 17, 09 | 5:46 pm

Money, Marketing, Production, Soulseek, FWYH and PR is why Goth and Industrial are not so commercially Viable.

Posted by: Caustic... on Jul 17, 09 | 5:36 pm

to agree with nulldevice, "electro", ie the huge "electro house" helps make total sense of the word getting more hits. Not saying "goth" or "industrial" are necessarily flourishing, but both terms are a lot more defined.

Posted by: staalplaat on Jul 17, 09 | 2:36 pm

why label and who cares
I see this as the weather, you just have to live with what comes.
And I don't really care for we stopped with gothic and industrial for 10 years but for the opposite reasons it was getting to big and boring.

Posted by: manu0112 on Jul 17, 09 | 1:50 pm

this is all semantics, as you pointed out Bernard. We just evolve and call the various genres of music with different names as there are more & more variations on the same genre. But I think, too that the general scene has evolved from the original "gothic" or "gothic rock" towards more modern "electro-industrial", and so forth... there are too many variables in the comparison for it to be absolutely meaningful (not to be a scientific nerdy dork or anything;-))

Posted by: nulldevice on Jul 17, 09 | 12:29 pm

"Electro" has also been variously applied to hip-hop and varieties of house music over the past 20 years or so. It complicates things a bit that there have been so many varieties of "electro."

Posted by: raedarius on Jul 17, 09 | 12:14 pm

To summarise, one term which means both Sleep Museum and Aux 88 is outperforming another term which means both Throbbing Gristle and Dawn of Ashes.