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Now one ever discusses this. How do you prefer a demo? With "real" music, that you can listen alone without the demo, or something else that you won't be able to enjoy without the demo behind?
I could find a few examples on that but everyone would disagree with me :)

Demo soundtrack vs. music.

In my case, there are a few demo soundtrack I listen without watching the related demos... just because most of the time, I find they are "soundtracks" and not music made for the purpose of saying something...
(I insist on the "most of the time")

Sometimes, people would relisten to the tune of a demo and they'll instantly remind visually the whole production, I guess it's why most people will disagree with what I/you say...

definitely demo soundtracks, or non-demo music with similar varied story telling audio transitions! (mainly electronica, some neoclassical and ofcourse movie soundtracks) i have become accustomed to it, and find regular none-demo music pretty boring. thankfully there's a lot of non-demoscene music with the same type of transitional visual style (best way i can describe it, srry)

Dope.mod

I like music I can listen to while watching a demo and it fits and afterwards while working, using my PC for something else.

A demo that has music which works on its own without the demo is a plus but not a must-have. You will always watch a demo with nice visuals but not so good music but a demo with good music but bad visuals I guess most will pass.

But thanks anyway for giving me a reason to plug my Demoscene.TV playlist containing demos with my favourite music tracks - that all also work mostly without the demo itself:

D.TV Playlist "Best Of Demoscene Music"

The trick lies in creating soundtracks that can live without the demo.
It's not easy - it never was.

The topic is about popularity of a music track, love-or-hate response.
There's no recipe, unfortunately for the uninspired musician, fortunately for all others =)

Long or short tracks,
monotonious or with many variations
easy listening or punk
minimal or containing so much instruments
rock, orchestral, techno, slow, fast...

The key is to make it interesting, period.

nutman, why would a demo soundtrack need to be able to live without the demo? if a demo manages to work with a soundtrack that would suck on its own, isn't that possibly an even cooler achievement? i'm thinking f.ex. about how different (and in my eyes, worse) some 1in10 tracks sound when played separately.

willbe: no, the key is to make it funky beats! everybody knows that!!1

Pretty much anything by jugi works as standalone tracks.

Yes, but do they really have to work standalone? Does anyone watch a demo without sound (even if it sucks, liike some tiny intros)?

Shockingly, I disagree. :) Well - that is; if the point of the demo soundtrack is to make the demo better, then sometimes (or even often) the soundtrack will not be as good without the visuals. That is because the track is tailored to the demo itself, and when listening to it without ever having seen the demo, the track might appear to have a strange buildup here, some weird cuts there, long sequences followed by strange breaks etc.

Oh, and also; I often find I have to leave out stuff that are interesting from a musical perspective, because they are too disruptive in a demo sense. Like; the soundtrack should not demand attention to be enjoyed. If the track is too overpowering, then the visuals suffer.

Music is the 4th dimension. If it's doesn't fit the first 3 the overall impression can get completely vanished away.

What ronny said. :)

It's the demo that should fit the soundtrack, not the other way round..

On the other hand, demos are a lot different from (real time) music videos as the goal is of course to create a coherent kick ass experience, not just add some visuals to an already existing piece of music that can stand on its own.

Just my opinion..

Hoplite: to a certain degree, sure, but when the demomaker suddenly needs to go "Oh, scheisse - here is a completely silent part, and then some sounds of a woodchipper.. err.. ookay, what do I do here?" and then has to make up something to fit that, which again does not fit the visuals, then the whole experience is going to drop in quality. But of course, it goes the other way as well.

In short: it's a colaborative effort -- sometimes the soundtrack needs tweaks to fit the demo better (like: cutting down a certain part, removing some hihats there etc.) and sometimes (most often, unfortunately, since people don't have the guts to demand changes from their musicians or don't really care) the demo needs tweaks to fit the track.

For me, the best demos are those where the soundtrack and the visuals go hand in hand, and for the ones I have worked on myself, those demos are a result of the demomakers talking to each other, discussing changes and implementing the best of the change requests.

gloom: i guess thats where creativity comes into play

ps: Of course. Forced creativity is cool, but sometimes people who aren't really creative are forced to "be creative", and the result is usually not that good. :) Really talented people can nearly always come up with something that works great though, there are many examples of that in demos as well.

Looking at this topic the other way, you could play a demo with the sound off and put your favourite CD on in the background instead, to see if the demo can live without the soundtrack. Not many would work well I expect :)

Gloom sure, couldn't imagine anyone making a demo without conversation with the whole team.. That would turn out as quite crappy demo..

For us the soundtracks were always an inspiration and a challenge, tracks that have always been so perfect that I never even thought of changing them.. Imagine the joy of starting to figure out what the hell effects would work with something like the soundtrack of Megablast, starting with tints of desperation and things eventually turning out ok :)

But I guess this is quite personal, and of course a team sharing a single brain helps a lot.

(oh yeah, I think we did actually add the bruce lee / marilyn screams to super television on top of the existing soundtrack with some hands on collaboration inside the team..)

Psonice right, don't do it. :) Mona Lisa wouldn't probably work without the smile either.

Psonice is right here and if you watch a demo completely without any music or sounds, it is going to be boring - for example years back it was mostly: no GUS, no sound, no means to even watch the demo.