Shooting a fish in a barrel, they say.
It’s unnecessary to point out the problems that a project like Smash The House, and, more specifically, Generation Smash has, but people usually miss the big picture in these cases. Today we are analyzing the 19 months of growth of the DV&LM sublabel, that, starting from its own name, was oriented to help small and medium producers in their long path to success.
In a nutshell: these labels are a huge mess.
A chaotic compilation of random releases where we can find literally everything. In fact, they were never meant to be solid realities with a characteristic sound and a stable artist roster: during the years we’ve seen long pauses, changes of management, social channels, artworks and genres. The only fixed presences are DV&LM’s friends and weird celebrities that shouldn’t be there.
One of the reasons behind the chaos, specifically, in GS is another change of management, involving Just Entertainment. In August 2019, the Italian agency evidently stopped working with the label (as we can notice when checking the newly created Beatport and Youtube playlists), leaving the label, that was doing well in the past year, to the chaotic situation, with its 5-6 weekly releases and no direction.
Now it’s evident that there are multiple people choosing the releases, and nobody cares about the final output, or even if the label has a minimal personality. Smash The House is for big names and historical friends of the owners, such as Wolfpack and Diego Miranda, Smash Deep is for 3 trendy House releases every week, the rest is random stuff spacing from promising talents such as Wildvibes or The Lost Triplets to cheap and low-quality trash. We find Pop, Future Bass, Big Room, Psy-Trance, Future House, and many other genres. We find the dubious names of the scene such as Andrea Damante & MATTN, and many people that clearly paid for being there, from unknown performers with zero releases to random TV showgirls, Le Donatella (congrats for the cringiest collab of 2020, Danko). All released via the same channel, Smash The House.
Generation Smash, and the whole STH label, is that kind of channel that can’t get a stable fanbase, with such a messy and unstable structure. If the label gets some attention it will would from a single release that got lucky, and not from its reputation itself. If there is a project for finding and promoting talents, it gets lost in the ocean of randomness. And it’s a pity!
The requisites for being in GS aren’t clear, neither of genre or popularity or technical quality. We would like more transparency from that side, in future… And maybe a sort of direction.
What do you think?
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