House, techno, bass, trance and their offshoots traced through the machines that made them: drum machines, samplers, synth presets, studio habits.
House runs at 120-130 BPM around a four-to-the-floor kick and swung grooves, tech house marries house's shuffle to techno's lean toolkit, and techno strips the shuffle out entirely — three lineages with distinct cities and tempos.
Spotify pays out by streamshare, not by a fixed rate per play — here's what that means for a working producer, and why the same stream can be worth twice as much on one platform as another.
Hard techno is techno pushed past 150 BPM with distorted kicks and rave-revival visuals — the sound that owned European floors by the mid-2020s.
Electro is hip-hop's robotic child from Detroit and Miami; breaks is Britain's big-beat explosion — two breakbeat lineages back from the edge.
Afro house is South Africa's percussive, soul-deep house strain — and by the mid-2020s it is one of clubland's biggest exports.
IDM is the laptop-era art school of electronic music — braindance, home-listening electronica and the records that made software an instrument.