About Us

DanStream is a Slovakian start-up founded by a team of dancesport music lovers with the ambition to create a better future for this genre by finally developing a streaming service that gets dancesport music right.

DanceSport Music's Digital Challenge

The world is undergoing a digital revolution for some time now, but dancesport music so far has mostly missed it. Dancesport music has had a really hard time transitioning from physical CDs to the digital realm. As a result, the genre has faced declining exposure over the last decade and this resulted in thousands of dancers scavenging for new music all the time. DanStream refuses to accept that this negative trend is inevitable and we believe that if dancesport music gets a modernized, reinvented platform, that would benefit all the dancers around the globe!

What we have developed

We developed a music streaming platform that addresses the unmet needs of dancers worldwide. On our platform, dancers can finally stream and download nearly all dancesport music that has ever been recorded in CD-quality, an ever-expanding catalogue of thousands of recorded tracks; they can seamlessly adjust the tempo of their played song or use special play modes, that are specific for dancers; they get songs, albums and playlists recommended regularly, that might interest them and they can also instantly access all of the newly released albums throughout the year.

Who we are

With a starting team of just two dancesport music lovers, that had grown into a team of 10 enthusiastic people over the years, we work towards enabling dancers to listen more often to more diverse dancesport music, be it for training, warmup or just on the go to make time fly! At the same time, our service aims to create more funds for dancesport music related artists and labels, so we can encourage the creation of even more music. Join us to create a better future for dancesport music, together!

How it all got started...

Not that long ago two dancesport music lovers with a dancing past from two different countries (Slovakia and Sweden) were discussing the future of dancesport music through a video conference call over a glass of wine. They were concerned. The world was undergoing a digital revolution, creating superior new propositions for customers in many sectors, including music. Streaming services emerged replacing illegal downloads with a new way of consuming music in a more customer friendly way, whilst at the same time paying artists their fair share. After more than a decade of widespread piracy these streaming services turned the tide: since 2015 the worldwide music sector has started growing again and pirated music was less and less lucrative. This also started the surge of new talented indie artists, diversifying the music scene even more. Unfortunately, these two dancesport music lovers realized, the tide was not yet turning in the world of dancesport… so they decided to turn it themselves. The thoughts of DanStream, as a dedicated dancesport music streaming platform has emerged.

"Dancesport music is strongly underrepresented on streaming services, much below its fair share. It’s such a shame dancers can’t get easy access to a wide variety of songs to train to!"

Dancesport music had been on a decline for very long now. It didn’t really make the necessary steps to undergo a critical change. The change for digital. As a matter of fact, experts projected that by 2030, 70% of global music consumption would come from streaming. This trend was clearly visible from the charts on the two dancesport lovers’s screens as well. The two concluded that dancesport music was facing an existential challenge: a genre that is enormously underrepresented in the dominant channel of the future does not have a bright future, to put it mildly. Declining exposure will reduce funding for talent and genre development dramatically. Not to mention the newer generation dancers, who grow up in a world of streaming. They will look at CDs and even pirated downloads as we look at walkmans and tapes. As remnants of an older era.

They started to wonder why dancesport music is so underrepresented in streaming. This was very important, because if they are going to make a new platform, they will need music for it from all the artists and music labels around the world, and they needed to know, why aren’t they releasing their works on major services. On one hand the answers were obvious. There are several drawbacks and non-existent essential features on major streaming platforms, such as: the lack of tempo adjustment of a played song, not showing what genre or tempo is a song in an album or search result, no option to choose how long should a song play, mimicking a round in a competition, just to name a few. On the other hand, they both saw how much interest is shown towards their few dancesport music albums that are available on the big platforms, their play counts just kept growing. So they decided to contact a third enthusiast and dancesport music veteran from Germany who later became the third pillar of the team.

With a third, very knowledgeable addition to the initial team, they decided to investigate a little. Soon they found out that generic streaming services have designed their metadata, search and recommendations algorithms based on pop music's structure: name of artist, name of album and name of song, and that's it. But dancesport music’s structure has typically at least two more additional information: genre and tempo. In other words, to solve the streaming pain points for dancers, fundamentally different metadata and algorithms are needed. As for the artists and labels not publishing their works on major streaming services, they were disappointed in the numbers their songs and albums had generated so they decided to recall most of their releases. This further cements the fact that without clever and somewhat aggressive marketing, dancesport music on such big platforms can not live up to its full potential. So the real work on DanStream has started.

Half a year later, now three dancesport music lovers discussed the future of dancesport music again over another glass of wine. The setting had improved in the meantime, as they were all there in person, not over a video conference, and dancesport music’s future also looked a little brighter. The application already had an initial build, but things had to be sped up. So the three bit the bullet: they decided to pour all of their free time and assets into this project so it can become a reality. About a year later, in March of 2020 the first beta testing of DanStream had started. It was going smoothly and the three founders started thinking about gathering a larger team of dancesport music lovers to aid the development of the world's best dancesport streaming service but then the pandemic happened. An early version of the service was soft-launched at a small scale in May 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak to make it easier for at least some dancers to access music for their home training. 

This was our journey until now… and it’s only the beginning!