The Dance Music Archive Catalogs the History of Dance Music Culture

The Dance Music Archive, an extensive online platform documenting 30 years of dance music culture, launched on August 3, 2021. It boldly showcases the headline, "The DNA of Dance Music." The website serves as a singular time machine for the dance music scene.

The initiative was imagined by respected UK DJ, producer, and radio host Andi Durrant. He’s one of Europe’s most fervent champions of electronic music. And throughout his career has personally interviewed hundreds of dance music luminaries like Daft Punk, Calvin Harris, and The Prodigy. He’s also been the executive producer on radio shows for Paul Van Dyk, deadmau5, Roger Sanchez, and others. He serves on the executive board of the Association of Electronic Music.

His passion for the culture shines through with the Dance Music Archive which started as a COVID-19 lockdown passion project he says, “quickly snowballed into something much bigger and we’re now building the world's biggest library of electronic music and culture." Durrant continues, "We’ve put a huge amount of time and love into creating the website that brings together all the news, pictures, artwork, flyers, playlists, DJ mixes, radio shows, and resources into one place — all organised by year."

The dynamic educational source serves as a hub offering mixed medium formatting with DJ mixes, radio shows, live sets, festival broadcasts, lost tapes, blogs, artwork, magazines, and forgotten archival footage. The front page showcases the documentary, "The Warehouse Project," a brief history of Cream the storied UK superclub that launched the career of Yousef, and a curated playlist from 1998. The richness of the content made it difficult to decide what to explore on our first scroll.