How popular music has influenced dance

Commercial dance has been heavily influenced and also heavily used within the commercial music industry. We see commercial dance all the time in music videos, on social media and in films. We are surrounded by dance as it grows in popularity and many people argue that it wouldn’t have become so big without commercial music. I am going to look into this.

The media has helped commercial dance to become widely accepted, especially through social media. For example there are hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded onto YouTube every day and there are even separate Facebook pages and Twitter pages dedicated to dance and especially commercial dance; the dance page on Twitter called “Dance Goals” currently has 246.1k followers and the Facebook page “Dance Wonderland” has 103.4k likes and follows. The great thing about social media is that everyone has control of their own media and everyone can share their own opinions online. This is then shown to the world through the internet. This means that if one person shares a video of dance then all of their audience can then view it and go on to share it themselves.

Songs have become well known because of the simple dance routines that have gone with them. The “Cha-Cha” slide for example, this song is played at parties because of the dance that goes with it. It is something that everyone knows and can do easily. This is the same as songs like “The ketchup song”. Of course there are much more complex dances such as “Single Ladies” by Beyoncé which everyone knows a part of and will happily dance along. Commercial dance has helped to bring the views of songs up too as it gives the audiences something to watch. Again, “Single Ladies” has currently had 424,324,847 views as opposed to “Heaven” by Beyoncé which only has 7,065,329 views to date. Dancing can also be seen as a second talent, for example Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

It is argued that commercial dance would not be as popular if it was not danced to commercial music. When music is used that people can easily remember it means that they can then easily remember the dance. For example when Flawless first danced on Britain’s Got Talent, they used sings such as the “118” theme tune in 2009 which made the audience laugh and remember them well. This gained popularity for both the group and commercial dance as a whole became more popular. It also made commercial dance much more popular for male dancers, prior to Flawless and Diversity commercial dance was much more female based.

Overall it seems that commercial dance and commercial music combined have become more popular than they would have alone. We can see the evidence of this in the views that Beyoncé’s two songs have had, it is quite clear that the audiences have watched the first video “Single Ladies” much more than they have watched “Heaven”. This could be because it is much more interesting to watch.

My Sources

Kerry, L. (2014). Fat Boy Slim Says Dance Music Got "Way Too Commercial". [Online]. Available at: http://www.gigwise.com/news/92656/fatboy-slim-says-dance-music-got-way-too-commercial. [Accessed on November 3rd]

Anon. (2009). Diversity Got Lucky, Flawless Should Have Won. The Daily Mail. 3rd June. Page 1