Tag: dance

Join Peloton Instructors Olivia Amato and Kendall Toole for Their Power Hour Workout Co-Created With deadmau5

August 28, 2020

Throughout their lives and early careers, Peloton instructors Olivia Amato and Kendall Toole always had a love for fitness. Olivia started out working on Wall Street but quickly noticed that taking her clients out for exercise classes and green juices was her favorite part of the job. Kendall was in theater and tech in Los Angeles before becoming a boxing instructor and eventually moving east to New York for her role at Peloton. And they agree there’s one genre that’s perfect for getting in the zone and breaking a sweat: dance and electronic.

Starting today, Olivia and Kendall will be introducing two new Peloton classes to the sound of one of Spotify’s big dance playlists: Power Hour. Peloton members can stream Kendall’s Power Hour Ride on August 30 or Olivia’s Power Hour Run on August 31 for a guided musical fitness experience on the Peloton Tread, Bike or App. What’s more, electronic music producer deadmau5 will be joining the instructors and Spotify for a takeover of our Power Hour playlist, complete with a new single from the producer himself.

“It’s a cool track and was a total wild card of a collaboration,” says deadmau5 about his new single, “Pomegranate – Jay Robinson Remix.” “I’m glad people got to enjoy it this summer and I’m looking forward to having it be a part of people’s workouts. I think they are going to dig getting to experience it with Jay Robinson’s remix.”

We caught up with each instructor for a few minutes between classes to get to know them and learn how they incorporate music into their routines. 

How do you pick the music that goes with your workouts? What elements do you take into consideration? 

Olivia: It depends on what the workout is and what type of mood I’m in. If I’m going to do a HIIT run, I want to do 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, and then build from there. I’ll think back to songs I know with three drops that are 30 seconds each. That’s obviously not always possible, and it definitely takes longer to program that, but I think it’s worth being that specific, because music is the most important thing during a workout. It also depends on the cadence of the song, so the beats per minute, or BPM. A lot of electronic songs can be used while climbing up a hill or on a flat road because they’re usually around 128 BPM, which is good for sprints and pushes. And then you can use a different type of music to get a different vibe for cooldowns. 

Kendall: When I am programming a class, I usually start with what’s inspiring me music-wise, what I feel would be energetic to ride to, or even down to something as simple as the energy and vibe of the song. If there are lyrics in a song that I know I can pick up on or use as a jumping-off point for motivation, it always helps. I think a proper ride and a wonderful workout should have a beginning, middle, and end. It should be no different than if you’re at an incredible concert or listening to an album where every piece of music, every moment, has its place, and it’s building into that story. When a beat drops and builds, I want riders to drop it and go into an effort. 

Tell us about the experience of working with Spotify to create playlists for your class.

Olivia: I have worked with a couple of the people who work on Spotify’s mint playlist in the past. We went through the different songs and different playlists to collaborate on what we thought would mix well together and what would fit the vibe of the class. So similarly for Power Hour, we looked at high-energy, fun music that pushes you forward. So just making sure they all flow nicely into each other, that it tells a good story of starting out.

How did deadmau5’s curation of Power Hour inform the workout you put together?

Kendall: First off, there’s nothing better than seeing an artist that you admire put together a playlist. It’s almost like getting movie commentary from a director’s cut. Where you have someone who’s such a pro at what they do and has such a unique perspective, and is just so committed to their craft, almost giving you a behind-the-scenes piece of what they like and what they’re into and what connects to them. What he’s curated for Power Hour are suggestions for what gets him moving. Then we can put fitness into it. It’s cool because I feel like I get to bring my fitness expertise and marry it with his ability to create and craft incredible music.

How does music help bring the runners and riders together, especially when they’re all doing the workout on their separate treads, bikes, and screens? 

Olivia: I think music is a global unifier, which is exactly what we need, especially right now. It evokes memories and creates memories. So it can create or evoke strength, passion, encouragement. And as it’s doing that, it’s bringing people from all around the world together. It’s a universal language that anybody can understand just based on feeling. For example, I don’t just use music for inspiration when working out. When I need courage or motivation, I put on music. It’s really for everything, and I think a lot of people feel that way.

Kendall: What I love about Peloton is transitioning that love of riding on beat with learning something new. That cadence, that BPM is so important in the way that I structure and program my classes because of this ability to be a unifying factor, especially when you’re teaching people from the comfort of their own home. At times, it’s challenging because you’re not present with them to be able to make corrections or adjustments, so you know you can always rely on that beat, on that BPM to be almost an assistant or an assistant coach, if you will, to what you’re creating and wanting to help people take through in a story of a ride. 

Did you know you can connect your Spotify account to Peloton to save songs from class via the Track Love feature? Simply tap the heart icon on Peloton Bikes & Treads next to the song title, then look for your saved tracks under “My Peloton Music by OnePeloton.”

Check out our previous co-curated Peloton classes inspired by mint & Housewerk, available on demand via Peloton, and look forward to more rides inspired by Spotify’s owned and operated playlists coming soon.

Spotify Has the Pawfect Playlist for You And Your Pet

January 15, 2020

There is something uniquely special about the relationship we humans have with our pets—it’s one filled with unconditional love, licks, snuggles, and cuddles. It’s hard to put into words the emotion these animals give us—other than pure happiness. So it’s only natural that we want to make them feel good, too, and many pet owners believe they do exactly that with music. 

We dug our paws into the subject and conducted a study on how pet owners use music with their pets. We found that 71% of pet owners surveyed play music for their pets, and that’s not all. Check out the rest of the furry (read: fun) facts we unearthed from pet owners in five countries across the globe.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith on New Music, Discovery, and Spotify’s Altar Playlist

December 11, 2019

Many electronic producers double as DJs, and most DJs also produce, but Dan Snaith is more versatile than most. Since 2001, the music he makes as Caribou has set a high standard for melodic, propulsive, sonically adventurous indie dance. Then there’s Caribou the live act, which expands Snaith’s studio material for a full band—not just interpreting the songs, but radically transforming them. Finally, Snaith moonlights as Daphni, turning out sleek funk and disco edits for his famously wide-ranging DJ sets.

The sweep of Snaith’s output, spanning home-listening faves and underground club heaters alike, makes him a fitting figure to spotlight as Spotify relaunches its Altar playlist. Dedicated to alternative electronic music and club culture —spanning house, bass, techno, downtempo, and just about every conceivable permutation thereof—Altar reflects the kinds of sounds that Snaith spent nearly 20 years pioneering.

This February, Snaith will release Suddenly, the first new Caribou album in more than five years. The first single, “Home,” dropped in October, and the second single, “You and I,” earlier this month. When For the Record reached Dan Snaith at his studio in London, he was working on preparations for the band’s upcoming tour. “It’s all starting to become real,” he said. “It’s been so long that I’m just so excited to get it going again.”

We spoke with Snaith about his creative process, his upcoming album, and the state of electronic music right now.

“Home,” the first single from the forthcoming Caribou album, almost sounds like it could be a Daphni song. How do those two projects inform each other?

There are definitely some Caribou tracks that almost could have been Daphni tracks, like “Bowls” on Swim or “Mars” on Our Love. It’s kind of magnetic: Sometimes there’s an attraction; sometimes it’s the opposite. After the Daphni album in 2017 was when I really started making this new Caribou record in earnest. It was like, okay, now I can have more all-encompassing tracks that explore harmony or lyrics, whereas Daphni is specifically about making music that’s club-focused. “Home” kind of sits apart from a lot of the other stuff on the record, actually. There are things that are reminiscent of Daphni, but I think there’s a lot that’s quite far away from that world as well. 

With Caribou, are you gathering pieces of songs before you actually sit down to make the album in earnest, or are you starting from scratch?

I’m gathering pieces all the time. I’ll have a verse for a year and then eventually I come up with a chorus, or some switch gets flipped and another piece of the song comes together. There are some loops on the new record that existed even before Our Love was finished. I sit down in the studio every day and I make four or five 30-second-long loops, little ideas. So if you think about how long I’ve been making this record, now I’ve got a playlist with 900 ideas in it. Then it’s this editing process, funneling things down over a long period of time, to get minutes of music out of hours and hours and hours of stuff. Which sounds torturous, and sometimes it is, but that’s the thing that I most enjoy, starting from nothing and making some kind of idea. 

Let’s talk about the state of electronic music. What sounds are you particularly excited about right now?

When I started in the early 2000s, the idea of somebody in experimental electronic music working on a Timbaland or a Neptunes record seemed totally absurd. Currently, there’s a much closer connection between experimental electronic music and the mainstream. It’s kind of hard to draw a boundary anymore. Now everything is electronic music, in a technical sense. Everybody’s recording on the same tools, whether you’re making a Taylor Swift record or a Skee Mask record.

That said, there have been times when I felt like I understood where the momentum in the electronic music world was. In 2008, 2009, living in London, meeting people like Floating Points, Joy Orbison, the Hessle Audio guys, it was like, wow, there’s something really exciting and focused happening. It was easy to feed off that energy. Now, it doesn’t feel like there’s a central narrative, but what’s exciting about what’s happening is that there are many more diverse voices in electronic music than there used to be 10 or 15 years ago. 

It’s been a while since any significant new genres have emerged. Do you sense anything new on the horizon?

When I was in high school, I heard jungle for the first time, and I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. I haven’t had that shock-of-the-new feeling for a long time. I hear individual producers with new ideas, but not something so completely new as a genre that it allows for a whole world to jump out of it. Presumably that will happen again. 

It sometimes seems like there’s so much electronic music out there now that there isn’t the chance for consensus to build.

I feel like people are waiting for it. Everybody is talking about what a big tune that Overmono track “Le Tigre” is. Now that the Caribou album is done, I’m excited to get out there and be playing, but I’m also sneakily going to start thinking about making club music again, because I’ll be out there doing shows, maybe I’ll play at the occasional after-party. It’s moments like that that get me geared up like, “Okay, I gotta make something that, like, bangs in a club.”

You’ve been around since the days of actual physical crate-digging in record stores, and a lot of the music you make as Daphni is rooted in sampling rarities. How has streaming changed the way you discover music?

I think I’ve learned about more new and exciting music digitally than I did when I was mostly digging through dusty piles of records, although I think there’s still room for both things. As a music fan, how can it not be wonderful that the entire history of recorded music is available to everybody at all times? As somebody who grew up in small-town Canada finding it difficult to get my hands on records, I’ve met young people over the past decade or so that have a remarkably eclectic and encyclopedic knowledge of music and music history. If they want to learn it, it’s all available to them. 

You know, I’ve got this 1,000-plus-song playlist called “The Longest Mixtape.” Apart from my own music, the one thing that I have to share with people is that I’ve spent my whole life digging, finding obscure and popular music that for me has something special about it, some magic. And I thought, if I could put all those things in one place for people to listen to, this is something that’s possible now and was never possible before.

Are you a fan of Altar? 

Yeah! With a playlist like Altar, you go there knowing it represents a certain type of music that you’re interested in and discover things you don’t know. I also like the fact that it’s occasionally curated by other people. You look at it and see, oh, Peggy Gou or somebody has picked a bunch of stuff that she’s into at the moment. That idea of having guest curators seems like a really interesting way of sharing people’s personal tastes within a palette where you know roughly what to expect.

Is there anything that you want to say about your album?

I’m just so excited for people to hear this album in full. People have heard the first two singles, but I feel like it’s a real album album. There’s so much diverse stuff sitting there together that I hope coheres in a kind of narrative throughout. It’s something I’ve lived with for so long. Actually, the other day, a friend of mine came over, and I’ve listened to it a zillion times, obviously, but he was like, “Can I just listen to it the whole way through?” I was like, Okay, here goes, I gotta listen to this one more time. And it was the first time that I heard it as a listener. You know, you get so wrapped up in the details, like, the minutiae of mixing and mastering. I hadn’t listened to it for a month or so. And I sat down and listened to it with him, and it was reassuring. I thought, this is something that I can be proud of.

Check out Caribou’s latest single, “You and I,” on Altar.

11 Dance/Electronic Subgenres Heating Up This Summer

August 6, 2018

Dance and electronic music is known for its power to unite fans from across the globe, but real aficionados agree that there’s no one way to blend the many styles, sounds, and artists that make up the expansive and ever-evolving genre.

“The electronic music genre umbrella has to be the largest musical classification. It’s crazy how so many descriptors were accepted throughout its evolution,” says Spotify Dance editor Austin Kramer. “House, rave, club, EDM, dance, electronic are all part of the culture. The semantics all dissolve to one thing: how it makes you feel.” He praises Tomorrowland, which just wrapped two epic weekends, as an example of a popular festival that truly embraces “the diversity of dance music.”

According to Kramer, Tomorrowland hosts more breakout artists than many similar, large-scale festivals. But whether you nabbed a ticket to Belgium or not, there’s still a way to discover and connect with these new and rising artists.

If you’re a dance fan, you probably follow Spotify’s flagship playlist, Mint. Still, you might not know about Spotify’s many dance and electronic subgenre playlists, which house a veritable treasure trove of emerging (and established) artists within bass, indie, techno, and more.

According to diehard fans and experts like Kramer, there’s simply “no way to classify” the many subgenres (and sub-subgenres, and sub-sub-subgenres) that make up the growing dance/electronic/club scene. But while it’s impossible to neatly categorize, it is possible to explore the genre’s limits via Spotify.

Check out our Mint playlist right here, and then learn more about some of our other favorite styles below.

Featuring fast kicks, cymbal smacking, wobble leads, and noted Jamaican dub and reggae influences, Drum & Bass grew from the rave and jungle scenes of Britain in the early 1990s.

Future House is a subgenre that fuses electro/deep house with meaty bass lines. It can bounce and build.

Trap blends hip-hop production (hats, kicks, vocal cuts) with bass drops and large-room effects in halftime.

House originated in Chicago post-disco by mixing funk/soul samples on top of electronic synths/instruments and drum machines (though it now varies in style and influence). House can be seen as the style of music and its variations, but also as a movement and philosophy of unity and love, and the stem of dance music culture today.

Indie Dance/Electronic is a subgenre that fuses rock and electronic. Styles include synth pop, alternative dance, future bass and nu disco.

Characterized by its use of melody, Trance was another early style that’s been evolving for decades. Soaring builds, anthemic, uplifting, hard-hitting chords; a true culture in itself.

Techno is defined by repetitive instrumentals and futuristic themes, ranging from delicate melodic soundscapes to throbbing industrial beats.

Melodic Bass incorporates intense bass lines, colorful melodic builds, and airy drops.

Tech House fuses the minimalistic characteristics of techno with the swing of house.

Afro House/ Soulful House blends African music with house beats.

Fast and hard, Hardstyle is a subgenre that combines distorted leads, euphoric melodies, and face-melting kick drums.

Subscribe to Spotify’s dance playlists to stay updated on the latest and greatest in electronic music.