Project 46
Project 46 is the Canadian dance-pop duo of Thomas Shaw and Ryan Henderson, two producers who actually met over Skype through a mutual friend back in June 2011 and started building tracks together before they’d even met in person. That’s a very 2011 origin story, and it fits a duo that came up right as progressive house and pop-leaning EDM were colliding on Beatport and festival lineups everywhere.
Their breakout came fast. In April 2012, “Reasons,” a collaboration with singer Andrew Allen, topped Beatport’s overall chart and picked up airplay on BBC Radio 1, a huge look for a duo that had barely been together a year. That single helped push Project 46 onto DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs list that same year, debuting at #100, a serious achievement for a young act working out of Vancouver and Waterloo rather than a major dance music hub.
From there, Project 46 built a run of collaborations that showed they could hang with dance music’s bigger names. They linked with Kaskade on “Last Chance” in 2013, which landed on his Grammy-nominated album, then teamed up with Laidback Luke for “Collide” in 2014, which cracked Beatport’s Top 20. They also worked with Paul Oakenfold on “Higher” and Bynon on “Eyes,” rounding out a catalog built on melodic, vocal-driven house that leaned pop without losing its club edge. Their debut album, Beautiful, dropped in July 2015 on Ultra Music and pulled together a lot of those earlier collaborations alongside new material.
Project 46 kept the momentum going for years afterward, including another Kaskade collaboration, “Chains,” in 2020. Along the way, they became known in the scene for “Pancake Fridays,” a weekly habit of dropping new material on SoundCloud that let fans hear works in progress and B-sides on a consistent schedule, long before that kind of direct-to-fan release culture became standard practice. They also built a real touring presence, including residencies in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, proof that the Beatport chart success translated into an actual live following.
Project 46’s story is a solid example of how a duo can break out of a smaller scene, land the right features, and turn a handful of big collaborations into a real career in dance music.
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