With their ideas and their work on technologies and instruments, that allowed the production of sounds and music with a minimum of efforts, Kraftwerk also became pioneers of the - literally spoken - House[Home]-Music.

One of the most important, stylistic influences they surely had was on the whole section of Synth- & Techno Pop.
Without their groundbreaking records 'Trans Europa Express' and 'Die Mensch Maschine / The Man Machine', bands like Depeche Mode, Ultravox, OMD, Cabaret Voltaire a.m.o would never have had the instruments and rhythms laid down in front of them, on which they later built their own music and their own success.

Of all those Elektro-Pioneers from Germany, no other band had devoted their fascination for electronic sounds so consequently to the pop-potential of this music.
'Trans-Europa-Express', 'Die Roboter / The Robots' a.o. songs were world-wide dancefloor hits and at the same time prototypes of industrial-music.

It began, when black musicians started to discover the dancefloor-qualities of Kraftwerks machine-rhythms for themselves:

"Scratch a Techno whizkid or studio engineer, and 9 times out of 10 you'll find a Kraftwerk fan - the tenth will be too busy sampling them to respond." MOJO Magazine - 4/97

"The originality of my music lies in it's technical production - through that it is much more a product of our time, as other form of music. Today we live between nuclear power plants and transistors - and exactly this characteristic of my music is very important for me. It is a suitable, contemporary expression of the time we live in." Klaus Schulze

In the meatime the technology has become accessible for many more musicians - thus a proliferation of releases takes place and the styles and sounds keep on developing, morphing and interbreeding.
With the - very roughly sketched - sections Techno and Ambient the two main fields of electronic music had crystallized. Since then a multitude of diverse mix-forms- and styles - with one of the most recent, simply labeled 'Elektro', combining the basic techno-beats with the more soundscape-oriented ambient-sounds plus a little pinch of Musique Concrete.

Schulze - like no other of these electronic musicians, also keeps on working on the borderline of electronic and classical music. These experiments can be followed throughout the whole body of his work. Already on his debut-album Irrlicht he strived, while still an absolute electronics-beginner who struggled with the transistors inside his mini-organ, for the synthesis of artificial / electronic and symphonic sounds.

Voices of Syn from 1974, contains a 'Verdi Collage', performed by trained opera-singer - and Schulze let this performance turn smoothly into a pulsating prototype of a techno-beat. On his "X" album an entire orchestra is perfectly integrated into his Synth-scapes. These were surely the very first electro-classical symphonies.
These many-sided synthesis', that in the meantime also contain elements of 'World Music', are carried on by Schulze up to these days. His unwavering lust to experiment is quite a singular phenomenon - not only in the fiel of electronic music.

But TD's sound-explorations went way beyond those more well-known sides of their soundscapes. In contrast to many ambient musicians to follow them, they never hesitated, especially in the first decade of their existence, to integrate 'noise' and 'industrial' elements into their music - especially in their concerts during the 70's. [Sadly, a lot of TD's most breathtaking material from that period hasn't been heard by the wider public - the probable main problem: there is simply too much of good material...]