Emm: What style of music is on Fair Park?
SH: Fair Park is more your straight ahead deep house with a little Chicago influence. The Chicago house sound had a big influence on the Dallas house music scene. Dallas is really like forming up it’s own sort of sound. It’s definitely a groovy sound, with some soulful elements to it, but it can be a little techy at the same time.
Emm: I’ve heard a lot about of how the dance music industry is kind of in decline now. Have you seen that in doing what you do?
SH: Absolutely, yes. I think, it has gone in a major decline. Average house music sales have declined maybe forty to fifty percent over the last couple of years, which is big. The main record industry has been on about a seven to ten percent decline. There was a real boom a couple of years ago where a lot of people with ordinary day jobs were buying a lot of dance music.
I think people need to do a little more to bring in a new audience to the whole thing. Because everything is so categorized, you’re either into drum and base or you’re into house, people may feel alienated from exploring a different type of music. That’s why I try and push this whole playing dance music theory. I want everybody involved, I want the new people to come out to the club. I think building a new audience is what everyone needs to look at right now if we want to make all this work.
Emm: Do you think file swapping has damaged the dance music industry as well?
SH: I don’t know if it has. You don’t really want to play MP3’s at the club; they don’t sound good enough for the club. We’re definitely in a new time right now with different technology and things are changing. We're going to have on our web site soon where you can download MP3’s, download files and things like that, because we’re just embracing it. There’s always a new format, and it usually develops when the music industry is in a decline. When stereo records first came out, it was like wow! Then CD’s came around and the music industry had a big boom because everyone had to get their old Bob Marley and Bob Dylan albums on CD so they could hear them clean and crisp. And now there’s a new format again and it’s the format that the young people want to purchase or swap their music on. People still do want to pay for it and they will pay for it if given the right opportunity to do so. Yes, people are stealing some things, but what do you do? You can’t really stop it. When FM radio came out, they thought everyone would record their favorite songs off the radio instead of buying, but it made for another boom. So I’m just hoping at this level it creates more exposure for artists.
Emm: What’s your favorite thing about the dance music scene in general?
SH: Dancing, having fun, and smiling, everybody hanging out together, it’s as simple as that. I don’t go real deep with it. I don’t know if it’s going to revolutionize the world, I think if more people danced the world would be a better place. It seems like in a lot of other cultures people really dance a lot as part of their daily-weekly thing. Whether it’s with your family, you dance in your house, at a party, at a barbecue, whatever, it’s like I just think it’s a grate thing for people to dance. Will it change the world? I think it already has, it changes the world all the time, or it changes when the world changes. But that’s it, just dancing, everybody having fun, celebration.
