Development of House music
House music is the direct descendant of the 1970s dance style of Disco, which blended soul, R&B, funk, salsa, rock and pop with a progressive, pro-diversity message. House music also incorporated other influences, such as New Wave, Reggae, Euro-Synth Pop, Industrial and Punk as well as the emerging Rap and Hip-Hop styles. House music DJs experimented with new editing techniques and electronic instruments, such as "remixing," "sampling".

House music was developed in the houses, garages and clubs of Chicago and Detroit, and it was produced for local club-goers in the "underground" club scenes, rather than for widespread commercial release. As a result, the recordings were much more conceptual, longer than the music usually played on commercial radio. House, techno, electro and hip-hop musicians used analog synthesizers and sequencers to create and arrange the electronic elements and samples on their tracks. House music "humanized" of the new electronic instruments by combining live traditional instruments and percussion and soulful vocals with preprogrammed electronic synthesizers and "beat-boxes".

The chief source of this kind of records in Chicago was the record-store Importes Etc, where the term “house” was introduced as a shortening of "Warehouse". Despite the new skills, the music was still essentially disco until the early 1980s when the first stand-alone drum machines were invented. House tracks could now be given an edge with the use of a mixer and drum machine. This was an added boost to the prestige of the individual DJs.

The Colonel Abrams track "Trapped" produced by Richard James Burgess in 1984 was a huge international club hit throughout 1985 and contains many of the elements that would become typical of house music - the four to the bar kick drum pattern, programmed bass-synth and driving sixteenth note hihat/snare part. Burgess and Jesse Saunders worked together in 1986 on a Geffen project. And these early collaborations brought New York and Chicago's house greats together for the first time. British producers Stock Aitken Waterman would exploit house by mixing it with bubblegum lyrics.