The 2020s File Feature
The Business
Tiësto's "The Business": Chart History and Commercial Success "The Business" by Tiësto was released in October 2020 and became the Dutch DJ and producer's mo…
01 The Story
Tiësto's "The Business": Chart History and Commercial Success
"The Business" by Tiësto was released in October 2020 and became the Dutch DJ and producer's most significant mainstream commercial hit in years, marking a return to dominant chart form after a period in which his profile had remained high within the electronic music world but had not consistently generated pop crossover results of the scale he had achieved during the peak of the EDM boom of the early 2010s. The track was released through Atlantic Records and demonstrated the continued commercial viability of melodic, hook-driven electronic dance music in the streaming era.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "The Business" reached a peak position of number 14, a strong showing for an instrumental dance producer who was releasing material under his own name without featuring a major vocal star. The track's performance on the Hot 100 was sustained over many months, reflecting the reality that streaming-era chart longevity is often more valuable commercially than a brief high peak. The song's presence on the chart through late 2020 and into 2021 made it one of the more enduring electronic dance hits of that period.
On the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, "The Business" was far more dominant, reaching number one and maintaining that position for an extended run. This chart performance established it as one of the signature electronic tracks of its era, a record that defined Tiësto's commercial positioning at a moment when the broader EDM scene was navigating the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on live events and festival culture. With clubs and festivals shuttered worldwide, streaming consumption of dance music became an even more central way that audiences connected with the genre, and "The Business" benefited from that shift.
The song was written by Tiësto (born Tijs Michiel Verwest) alongside Monty Datta and Tommy Lee James, with additional songwriting contributions from other collaborators. The production combined an insistent four-on-the-floor beat structure with a bright, anthemic synthesizer hook and a vocal refrain delivered with an energy appropriate to the festival-sized stages Tiësto had spent his career headlining. The track's production values were polished to a degree that reflected Tiësto's experience working across the highest levels of electronic music production for two decades.
The vocal on "The Business" was delivered by Tiësto himself, a relatively unusual choice for a producer who had historically worked with featured vocalists on his pop crossover material. The decision to sing gave the track a more personal quality and contributed to its identity as something different from the purely featured-artist model of EDM pop hits. The vocal performance was processed and blended with the production in a way consistent with contemporary dance-pop aesthetics, sitting within the mix rather than sitting above it as a traditional lead vocal performance.
The accompanying music video depicted Tiësto in a nightclub environment replete with neon aesthetics, choreographed dancers, and the kind of party imagery that has been central to EDM visual culture since the genre's mainstream emergence. The video accumulated hundreds of millions of views on YouTube, providing both an important streaming revenue stream and a visual context that reinforced the track's identity as a club-oriented record even as its mainstream chart success suggested a far broader audience.
Internationally, "The Business" performed exceptionally well, particularly in European markets where Tiësto's credibility as a pioneering trance and electronic music figure remained extremely high. In the United Kingdom, the song reached the upper reaches of the singles chart. In the Netherlands, Tiësto's home country, it achieved significant chart placement. Across streaming platforms globally, the song accumulated billions of streams, with Spotify figures alone eventually crossing numbers that placed it among the most-streamed electronic tracks of its release year.
The RIAA certified "The Business" platinum multiple times in the United States, and equivalent certifications followed in multiple international territories. The song's commercial performance was recognized by industry observers as evidence that the melodic electronic pop format remained commercially durable even as other trends competed for attention in the mainstream market. For Tiësto personally, "The Business" represented a commercial milestone that refreshed his mainstream profile and demonstrated continued ability to produce music resonant with mass audiences more than twenty years into a career that had begun in the late 1990s Dutch trance scene. The track joined his catalog as one of his signature achievements at the crossover level of commercial success.
02 Song Meaning
Themes and Meaning in Tiësto's "The Business"
"The Business" operates within the celebratory tradition of electronic dance music that positions the club, the dance floor, and the shared experience of music-driven communal ecstasy as the highest available form of social pleasure. The track's recurring reference to a particular arrangement of connection and attraction as "the business" uses slang in a way that simultaneously signals cool and communicates genuine enthusiasm. The phrase functions as an intensifier of approval, a way of saying that what is happening is the real thing, authentic and fully realized rather than approximate or provisional.
The context in which "The Business" was released gives its themes additional resonance. October 2020 was a moment when live music events, clubs, and festivals had been shuttered for months by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the prospect of their return remained deeply uncertain. Dance music made for communal spaces took on a different emotional coloring when heard in isolation, becoming simultaneously a reminder of pleasures unavailable and a promise of their eventual return. Many listeners experienced "The Business" as precisely this kind of forward-looking comfort, a record that held the feeling of the dance floor in suspension for a moment when the dance floor itself was inaccessible.
Tiësto's long career as one of the defining figures of electronic dance music gives the track a lineage dimension as well. Having begun his career in the Dutch trance scene of the late 1990s and moved through multiple evolutionary phases across two decades, he brings to "The Business" an accumulated authority about what makes dance music work. The song's construction, its building energy, its carefully calibrated drop, its vocal hook placed at exactly the right moment to deliver maximum emotional impact, reflects deep experience in the craft of making bodies move on dance floors. This expertise is itself part of the song's meaning: it is music made by someone who has spent his professional life understanding the relationship between sound and physical and emotional response in collective settings.
The song's romantic theme, its depiction of attraction and the heightened social world of a night out, connects it to the long tradition of music that uses the party or the club as a setting for narratives of desire and possibility. The nightclub context in electronic dance music is rarely simply a neutral background; it is a compressed social universe where identities are performed with particular intensity, where normal inhibitions are somewhat suspended, and where connections are made that feel, in the moment of their making, unusually meaningful. "The Business" captures this atmosphere with precision, creating a sonic environment that mimics the emotional arc of a night whose potential feels unlimited.
There is also a dimension of aspiration in the track's title and its repeated assertion. Calling something "the business" is a way of affirming that it meets the highest standard, that it delivers what it promises, that it is not a pale imitation but the genuine article. In the context of dance music, this aspiration is partly about the music itself, about the promise that this particular track will be the one that makes the night cohere, that will serve as the sonic marker for a memory of feeling fully alive. Electronic dance music makes this promise structurally, through its architecture of buildup and release, tension and resolution, and "The Business" executes that structure with a confidence that justifies the implicit claim embedded in its title. The song knows what it is doing, and that self-assurance is itself part of what makes it satisfying to listen to.
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