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There's always a lot of talk about dance music really blowing up and becoming as much a mainstream style of music as rock or hip-hop. And while we'll probably continue to hear more and more dance and electronic influences in other, more popular forms of music, I think dance music's crossover appeal is still greatly exaggerated by all those people who seem convinced that being in a Volkswagen commercial is a sure-fire guarantee of climbing the charts. Want reasons? I got ten of 'em. Even if you disagree with some of them, any one of these is enough to keep dance music nice and niche market for many years to come:

1. It's too damn fast. This is the problem with perhaps the least staying power, as the speed of modern society continues to accelerate to the point where hard, driving techno is the only logical soundtrack for much of our lives. But I still have friends who, when I put on what I consider to be a "chillout" album like St. Germain's Tourist, ask me if I have anything mellower, so I know there are people out there whose metabolisms don't easily adjust to 120-plus beats per minute.

2. No lyrics. Just like there's people who can't watch a movie with subtitles, so there are people who can't listen to music unless it's possible to sing along. Actually, not all dance music is lyric free; just most of the good stuff. Because . . .

3. Dance music lyrics mostly suck. Imagine if rock 'n' roll had never grown out of its "Tutti Frutti" and "Doo Wah Ditty" phase and you have a pretty good idea of the state of affairs on the dance scene. House tunes have their screaming divas urging you to feel the beat take you higher; trance anthems have their ecstacy-peak sex kitten cooing about love and togetherness; psy trance has its spoken-word voiceovers about fairies and alien abductions; breakbeat and nu skool have jumbled and looped b-boy samples that make your average hip-hop rapper sound positively Shakespearean. Let's just say dance music is a long way from finding its Dylan.

4. People don't like to dance. Let's face it, most of us aren't very good dancers, and most of the not-very-good ones don't particularly enjoy displaying their lack of groove in public. The head bobbing and fist-pumping that passes for dancing at most rock and pop concerts is safer territory. Plus, everyone's watching the band, not you. But go to your average club or rave and you'll soon discover that . . .

5. DJs are not fun to watch. Once upon a time no one cared about this -- they stuck the DJ off in a corner somewhere and the dancers watched who they were supposed to be watching, namely, each other (see reason #4 for why this is another strike against dance music's mainstream potential). Lately, however, the convention is to literally put the DJ on a pedestal, or even an actual stage, which now means that everyone dances facing the DJ, just like at your average rock or pop concert. But with a few notable exceptions (Fatboy Slim and Donald Glaude being the most obvious), DJs are not pop stars, and there's really nothing to watch -- it's just some guy in a Paul Frank monkey t-shirt, thumbing through crates of vinyl and scowling at the mixer like it's an unbalanced checkbook. So putting your average DJ up on a pedestal with fancy video screens and lasers flashing behind him only draws attention to the fact that he's not doing anything pop-star-like, and further convinces the mainstream crowd that club and rave culture is just, like, way lamer than those nifty synchronized dance moves and histrionic guitar solos they're used to.

6. The mainstream record industry doesn't know how to package dance music. Although there are a growing number of artists releasing entire albums of original material, the basic unit of exchange in dance music remains the track -- a typically six-to-eight minute exploration of grooves, beats and riffs released on 12-inch vinyl, mainly for the club DJ's benefit. And the most common way for these tracks to make it to CD is in the form of a DJ mix, which adds another layer to the product that big label record execs aren't used to and don't know how to handle. Which do we promote? The DJ? Or the artists who created the individual tracks? And where does the track producer's craft end and the DJ's begin? It's all very confusing to an industry that's used to packaging everything -- how do you "package" someone who, when all is said and done, is really just choosing what tracks to put on the disc? The indie labels that have put out the bulk of DJ product up till now haven't helped, either -- the highly successful Global Underground series, for example, reduces the DJ to a mere brand name by occasionally letting the credited DJ just pick the tracks, leaving the actual mixing to some anonymous studio deckhand. No wonder the mainstream is confused.

7. The rave scene has a Peter Pan complex. Although most forms of dance music are now firmly ensconced in the club scene, the music is still inextricably linked in many people's minds to raving, and raves are, if anything, even more dominated now by the under-18 crowd than they were ten years ago. A lot of people consequently think of much of the music, particularly trance, jungle, and hardcore, as kiddy music -- including some people I know who once listened to it themselves and now profess to having "outgrown" it. And the current teeny-bopper-pop-group fad aside, any genre of music that can't keep pace with the aging of its audience is doomed to niche-market status.

8. The drug thing. Semi-hysterical 20/20 exposes notwithstanding, survey after survey would seem to indicate that the majority of the public do not partake of any hard drugs, including the ones most frequently in circulation on the dance music scene -- ecstasy, LSD, mushrooms, GHB, cocaine, and Ketamine, all of which tend to enhance one's appreciation of dance music. If you've never tried any of them, there's still a fair chance you might get hooked on, say, progressive house (house being, by far, the easiest dance music genre to digest while not under the influence), but most people I know first got into dance music while they were high off their ass. And if you only ever get high on pot, booze, or maybe just life, chances are Dave Matthews Band has more than enough beats and weird sounds to keep you entertained, and you have no need for dance music's more frenetic vibe.

9. All those damn sub-genres. When jazz, rock and hip-hop first drew mainstream attention, they all had a fairly uniform, recognizable sound. Go back and listen to early tracks by Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins, and you hear the same instrumentation, the same rhythms, even similar singing styles. It wasn't until much later, when rock was already permanently imprinting itself on mainstream pop music and climbing the charts on its own, that the music began splintering into all the wildly different sounds that have constituted it in the years since. But the dance music scene didn't feel like waiting around for mainstream acceptance before exploding into a variety of sub-styles and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres that would make a zoologist's head spin. House, trance, techno, drum-and-bass, jungle, gabber, hardcore, downtempo, goa, garage, two-step, breakbeat, big beat, nu jazz, hi-NRG -- and oh yeah, then there's all those crossover genres like "progressive house", "tech house", "nu-step", "broken beat", "nu skool breaks". Confused yet?

Some of this stylistic splintering happened because DJs remained largely anonymous up until fairly recently, and so club nights had to use the genre of music to advertise, where a rock or hip-hop club could get away with just listing the talent. But a lot of it can be chalked up to sheer snobbery. For some reason the dance music scene has always been overrun with would-be trendsetters who are fond of putting down existing genres, and therefore have to make up new terms to describe what it is that they do that's supposed to be so new and different. "Progressive trance? That's so tired, man. Come check me out, I spin tribal acid techno trance". All this jockeying for new buzzwords does, admittedly, keep the scene interesting, but it also means that the scene has a habit of casting aside its own best products just when they're finally maturing into something capable of reaching a mainstream audience.

And most importantly . . . the final and biggest chunk of ballast keeping dance music from rising any higher . . .

10. The dance music scene doesn't want to go mainstream. Just as punk rock once thumbed its nose at the establishment (and you'd be surprised at how many of those punks can now be found out in the desert dancing to psy trance every weekend), many members of the dance scene -- ravers, clubbers, DJs, even some of the promoters -- are fiercely proud of their culture's "underground" status and would prefer to keep it that way. The number-two complaint I hear from friends about a particular club night or party, right after "the music sucked", is "and the crowd was too yuppie/guido/frat boy/normal". In other words, too mainstream.