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The dance industry responded to hip-hop dance by creating a commercial version of it. This studio hip-hop, sometimes called new style, is the kind of hip-hop dance seen in rap, R&B, and pop music videos and concerts. From the point-of-view of someone deeply immersed in hip-hop culture, anything that looks like hip-hop dance that did not come from the streets is not a true hip-hop dance form.

Hip Hop Isn't

Found in Studios. Today, you find a lot fo people in studios just doing movements to hip-hop music. So if there's hip-hop music in the background, and they're moving, they're calling it a hip-hop class. The problem with that is let's say I wanted to teach a ballet class and I just come in, and I throw on Mozart, and I just start moving—and I'm not doing any of the foundational elements. I am not doing any of the movement vocabulary of ballet. I can not call that a ballet class and that's what happens in relation to hip-hop... within the studio realm there is no standard for the art form, and [the teachers] don't know what the foundational elements of the art are. They know nothing about popping , nothing about locking , nothing about boogaloo, breaking , or the hip-hop dance—the social dances—or any of that. They know none of the history which spans over 30–35 years, and so they pretty much cut off any type of edification that a dancer can have.

In the context of the commercial dance industry, hip-hop (or new style hip-hop for dancers in France and Japan) is choreographed urban party dancing with studio technique added to it. From a technical aspect, it is characterized as hard-hitting involving flexibility and isolations-moving a specific body part independently from others. The feet are grounded, the chest is down, the posture is hunched, and the body is kept loose so that dancers can easily alternate between hitting the beat or moving through the beat. Like African dance, new style hip-hop is very rhythmic and involves a lot of footwork and radial movement of the hips . In addition, emphasis is placed on musicality-how sensitive your movements are to the music-and being able to freestyle (improvise) As long as dancers keep the foundational movements, they can add their own (free)style and have a performance that is still hip-hop