@Gordon Blumberg

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

The tracks you can’t get enough of lately, all in one place.

The songs you love. The more you use Apple Music, the better the mix. Refreshed every Tuesday.

Whether it’s Monday morning or Friday night, get going with this personalised mix of upbeat music.

Songs to help you relax and unwind. Updated every Sunday.

At heart, contemporary electronic dance music is a euphoric dream set to a 4/4 beat. That vision finds its purest expression in trance, a sleek, streamlined style that centres emotional uplift as its raison d’etre. The genre evolved alongside techno in the late ’80s and early ’90s, with the rigid arpeggios of Belgian new beat guiding its steady groove and glistening synths. Trance largely took shape in Germany, the site of its harder-edged innovations, and Holland, home to superstars like Tiësto and Armin van Buuren, while the trippier subgenre of psytrance took root in Israel and Goa. By the ’00s, aided by the music’s versatility—equally able to absorb pop melodies or get beefed up to main-stage proportions—trance had become a proudly global concern whose soaring melodies and rolling rhythms transcend borders and language. At festivals, trance fans may wear their home countries’ flags flung over their shoulders, but their chief allegiance is to the music and its message of unity.

Sit 'n choppie op die vuur en raak vir my rustig!

As the calendar flipped to Y2K, teen pop ruled music’s roost, with megastars like Britney Spears and *NSYNC dominating the charts. But over the course of the 2000s, a varied pop landscape would emerge, with streetwise hip-hop, emotionally fraught rock, swooning R&B, hook-studded emo and big-tent pop all getting their moments in the sun—and even coming together in DJ-crafted mash-ups and high-profile collaborations. Pop in the 21st century’s first decade reflected the emergent digital-music era, with the “on shuffle” ideal resulting in radio playlists where Kanye rubbed elbows with The Killers and Kelly Clarkson, or where a hard-hitting Eminem track was bracketed by offerings from Beyoncé and Mariah Carey. That mix of genres and outsize personalities made for an exciting decade that put the party back in pop.