There are a truly endless number of dance music sub-genres in existence. So many, in fact, that Ears To The House can’t help but wonder if some of them are just made up – such is the vast number that appear on the likes of Beatport. How is a record label supposed to ensure it gets heard in such a diverse landscape?

Some labels decided to counter this by simply specialising in one or two areas of dance music – whilst others try to manage it with different strategies. But what do you do when you run one of the biggest dance music labels in the world, with a fair number of sub-labels and back catalogue in the mix?

We don’t know – but we do know that taking a look at what Defected are doing might give us some clues. And it doesn’t take long to find out their answer to this dilemma – release lots and lots of different sub-genres of house music and see what floats and what doesn’t.

What else possibly explains the sheer number of sub-labels within the Defected group these days? A quick look at some of their recent releases has deep stuff, tech stuff, afro stuff – and once again, it appears they’ve tried dabbling with the garage house sound.

Previous boss Simon Dunmore used to occasionally decry the number of remixes of older tracks making the Traxsource charts – although his labels were pretty shameless in reworking their own archives whilst he was in charge. If anything, this hasn’t merely continued under current boss Wez Saunders – it’s accelerating.

In recent weeks, Defected has released new remixes of tracks from the Sub-Urban label – a US-based record label in the 1990s previously owned by Silvio Tancredi and Tommy Musto. For example, the 1996 release “It’s Gonna Be Alright (Help Is On The Way)” by Deep Zone has recently been reworked – and pretty well, too – by the supremely talented multi-instrumentalist Crackazat.

Elsewhere, Lee Genesis’s “Ya Can’t Seperate Me” has remixes by Sean McCabe coming out next week – whilst DJ Spen and Marc Cotterell have recently contributed new versions to these 90s underground releases. Disappointingly, though, only one new track has come out on the label since Defected acquired it – and it was a Marc Evans song a year ago.

So why is Defected recycling all these old tracks – is it just an attempt to cash in on nostalgia? A source close to the company denies the charge, saying, “Wez has been interested in the garage house sort of sound for a few years. I think he’s testing the waters. Investing in new music costs a lot of money, and this is one fairly low-risk way of assessing whether there’s demand in a particular area.”.

Then again, we did ask this question back in January. Ten months later, Saunders has apparently not yet reached an answer…