The Dance Sampler

Samplers were very popular in the Netherlands during the early days of the CD. One of the first was the so-called Premie-CD, an annual free gift that was ed after the purchase of a certain amount of music. On the Premie-CD, 15 artists ed one track of their repertoire, usually an album track, occasionally a hit song. The inlay booklet contained references to the albums the songs were taken from, which of course helped the sales of those albums.

The idea behind the Dance Sampler was similar. For the price of one CD single, the customer had 8 full length versions. There was an occasional hit (such as Human Resource "Dominator" on the first volume), but most other tracks were the unknown ones (usually repertoire from parent label Dance Device).
This series was a handy addendum to the Turn Up The Bass series, because it dug deeper than TUTB did. The Dance Samplers provided full length versions of the tracks, while the TUTB tracks were mostly edited. There was enough material to release a CD every month, and costs were low; for the price of one TUTB CD, one could buy 4 Dance Samplers. If you were looking for one particular long version, a Dance Sampler was with NLG 10 more cost-effective than a CD maxi single of NLG 16. Plus, you get 7-9 tracks extra.

Of course, this was not a formula destined to last forever. The CDs were usually 45-50 minutes long but had the production costs of an 80-minute CD. Sales figures were low because of the specific audience Dance Device was targeting. Revenues were also low and these low revenues had to be shared among 8-10 acts. And last but not least: the 1991 rave sound was going different directions and even in this narrow scope, techno, Eurodance and hardcore gabber found their own audiences who were not into each other's music.