Song Endings: 70s Disco Vs 90s Dance

[Disco Funk]

Recently I started going through my CD collection of 90s dance tracks, and one thing I noticed about most of the songs: The songs almost always ended cold (i.e. no fade out)! I'm bringing this up because I remember starting a thread a year or so ago where I wanted to see how many 70s Disco tunes we could name with cold endings. We came up with a good number of tracks, but the general feeling was that fade outs probably outnumber cold endings 8 or 9:1.

So I wonder why 90s dance flipped that around? Was it because the tracks were designed for mixing, not really listening to all the way to the endings, so the producers just felt all they had to do was peel away all the instruments until a final note? Or perhaps it was the use of computers and digital instruments that made it easier for songs to end cold cleanly, versus the 70s when either the musicians had to stop (which could be messy if they weren't fully in synch), or the mixer had to cut out the instruments in a hard, and perhaps messy, manner.

Disco Funk

[K-Bee]

I think the cold endings are for mixing purposes. Practically every house 12" mix today finish off with quite a few bars of drum loop allowing the DJ to work the following song into the flow. I Suppose that trend started out in the 90s at some point but it has never been more imminent than nowadays.

[Disco Funk]

Thanks for confirming that!

Disco Funk