How Dropbox is keeping the Dance Music industry creative: Point Point Q&A

Dance music has experienced a renaissance since the introduction of more readily accessible genres such as Electric Dance Music (EDM). Combine this with the surge in adoption of studio production to create today’s popular music and you can hear dance music’s influence everywhere.

Collaborations between dance music artists are now commonplace. The music moves so fast that in order to stay ahead of the curve you must seek influence and inspiration from people and things outside of your traditional spheres. It is all about finding your creative energy and capturing it, wherever you are. While coming together and collaborating in a studio is the ideal when trying to ‘get creative’ with your next track, this isn’t always possible given the speed at which the industry moves.

When supporting the Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) last month – an event that brought together 2,000 of the world’s top DJs, the biggest record labels, 550 speakers and over 350,000 visitors – we caught up with two of the DJ trio known as Point Point, Alex and Lemuel. We talked about their inspirations, harnessing their creativity and how they use Dropbox to collaborate and produce exciting new music, here’s what they told us:

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Lemuel: “I’ll give you a good example. We were on tour and had to catch a train to our next gig. Our tour manager had arranged the train so we just got on it. It ended up being the wrong train and we were stranded in the middle of nowhere for two hours. Someone started hitting a trash can and we recorded it on a phone. That sample sound was then used in one of our tracks and became a major hit.”

Ok, so how would you describe your music?

Alex: “We started off with the idea that everybody has to be able to listen to and enjoy our music. Whether that’s my mother, cousin, young or old. We try to combine some more melodic stuff with good beats.”

What trends do you see in music?

Alex: “We see Asia as a real upcoming market, people in South Korea and China really love our music and it’s a great crowd to perform for.”

Lemuel: “We also see people are listening to music differently. Before, people bought a record and listened to it over and over again for two months. Nowadays, people live very fast and this is true of their music tastes too. They want something new almost every week. They listen to one song for one minute and then move on to the next. So, we have to keep up with this pace and produce music frequently.”
So where do you work from, exactly?

Alex: “Anywhere. We are based in LA but fly to Paris every month. We travel all around the world. This week alone we are in Amsterdam, Cologne and London. Next week Toronto and San Francisco. I get stuff done on the plane, in my hotel room, anywhere really.”

Then how do you stay creative and bring your music together?

Alex: “We used Dropbox from the very beginning. We never used anything else. We can also access it on our phone, something that we couldn’t do with simple file transfer services. When we have a demo, we just create a Dropbox folder containing all the files, create a shareable link and send it out. It’s that simple. When we collaborate with a singer for example, we can upload the instrumental and the vocal tracks in there for everyone to see and work on their own elements.”

Lemuel: “It’s perfect. You just have a folder on your computer and you can share it. With Smart Sync it doesn’t eat up all of your space which is good because we have large files.”

What is the most important thing about making music for you?

Lemuel: “That it must be fun! If you overthink it too much it doesn’t work. Then you lose the good vibes and it’s the good vibes that make great music.”

To read more about how Dropbox is powering the music and media industries, head over to the blog here. Or to hear Point Point’s music, you can find them on SoundCloud, here.