John Truelove @ Dance Music 101

John Truelove is a British record producer, DJ, performer and music entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Truelove Music Publishing and Tortured Artists, based in Ibiza and London. He currently serves on both the Advisory and on the Executive Boards of the Association of Electronic Music (AFEM) – a not-for-profit trade association created to represent the common interests of those companies and individuals whose business is Electronic Dance Music and to advocate best practice for the genre.

Life: when was the moment you figured out that Dance Music was meant to you?

It was one hazy Monday evening back in the summer of 1988. I’d recently come out of a long-term relationship and was sat at home contemplating the meaning of life when some friends, who had already discovered Acid House a couple of months before (it was of course the so-called Second Summer Of Love), decided to kidnap me and take me out to cheer me up.

We ended up at the Heaven nightclub where Paul Oakenfolds legendary and seminal Spectrum night had already been going for some months.

As we turned out of Charing Cross station and into Villiers St I was amazed to see a line six or eight people wide stretching as far as the eye could see. There were probably six thousand people waiting to get into a club that holds 1800. I was told by my friends what to say to the guy, Steve, who ruled the door ferociously, and after a short hesitation and staring hard into my eyes, he let me in. Once inside someone bought me a bottle of water and stuck something in my mouth and … my life was changed forever!

From that point on and for the next 9 months, I was in a club or a rave or a chill-out, pretty much every night. I fell in love, I learned to mix, I made a record, I started my own music company (I called it Truelove, of course). I had a national hit. I taught myself about publishing and music rights by trial and error. My feet literally didn’t touch the ground for the following three years.

 Laugh: when was the last time you had real fun?

Space Ibiza closing. I have been going to Ibiza for 25 years and now spend much of my time there. The island’s party scene has been an integral part of my life. Space has provided me with countless happy memories over the years and the final ever closing this year was epic. A hint of the bittersweet about the occasion as I’m sad to see us lose such an institution, but what a party!


Love: name the one thing you love more than anything – and why is that?

Music. It’s my life.


Past: name a significant moment in your career in Dance Music – and why is that?

When I am asked this question people normally expect me to say when my own production “You Got The Love” by the Source first got to the top of the (UK) national charts in 1991, or subsequently in 1997, or 2006, or when as a publisher I finally got to represent the catalogues of people I had worshipped for so long, such as Larry Heard, or Gui Boratto, or GusGus. But honestly those times were such a blur it’s difficult to remember what I was feeling…  If I had to choose just one precise moment it would be the incomparable sensation of being in the middle of the dancefloor at Trade, the legendary London afterhours club, sometime back in the late 90s and experiencing the crowd going absolutely wild to a brand new underground techno track that I had just produced. Magic!


Present: what do you think that is trending today in music, clubs and festivals?

It’s great to see a sense of community back on the agenda in dance music. In recent years, the demands of self-promotion have gone hand-in-hand with an egotism that is the antithesis of what dance music is all about and it certainly hasn’t been helped (on a spiritual level at least) by an increasingly competitive and oversaturated mainstream. When Fabric was closed, it looked like another nail in the coffin for the underground but the way the dance community has stood united has been inspiring (and has hopefully contributed to a reversal of the courts’ decision). We’ve seen similar reactions to the shootings in Orlando and other hate crimes in clubs. It’s not that the love ever completely left the dance-floor but great to see it manifesting in a sense of community once more.


Future: where is industry heading in the years to come?

My business, Truelove Music Publishing, has for the last 15 years been focused on music rights and most particularly publishing (composers) and neighbouring rights (artists). We have signed artists and composers from all over the world (including from Brasil, artists such as Gui Boratto, Elekfantz and Anderson Noise) and as a company we have membership of collection societies all over the world. I sit on boards and committees at various of those societies. I am also a board member at trade bodies such as AFEM and the Music Publishers Association.

So I feel we have a really good grasp of where things are currently on both a local and a global level. And I can tell you, it’s going to be tough. Corporations and broadcasters, brands and music services, they all expect to get more and more for free. Many musicians, increasingly desperate to get a foot on the ladder, feel they have no choice but to perform for free, to license their work to advertisers and brands for free, to give away downloads of their tracks for free.

Too often do I find myself stepping in at the last moment on behalf of an artist or composer who has been bullied into (nearly) accepting a terrible deal, or giving their rights away for nothing.  And I can only see that situation getting worse in the years to come

To survive, and to provide a living for more than the top 1%, the industry has to find more and more solidarity to defend the value of music. Strong collective action through trade bodies such as AFEM, and individual action by managers, labels, agents, and by publishers such as myself, is required with ever increasing perseverance in order to push back these forces of ‘free’, and to demand, and receive, fair rewards on behalf of the talent we represent.

We have the technology and we have the infrastructure and we certainly have the talent and the will.

I am convinced that we can, and we will, prevail!

Thanks!