Music Week on digital DJ culture

Music Week on digital DJ culture

6 April, 2009 | 9.31AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: technology

Leading British music industry publication Music Week recently published (California Chronicle syndicated the article) an article called ‘Put the Needle on the Sound File’, in which writer Ben Osborne dissects the current trend in DJ culture towards laptops.

In the article Osborne interviewed a number of people involved in the dance scene (including myself) and although the article doesn’t bring anything new to the debate for the hardcore electronic music enthusiasts who discuss this topic constantly, it is interesting to see such a high profile publication recognize the trend.

I answered a number of questions about this topic which weren’t included in the final piece, so for anyone who’s interested here are some answers to some important questions about digital DJing.

Do you think that more DJs are using digital DJ tools or is it mostly people burning downloads to CD-R and then playing on CDJs?

Terry: In recent years there has been a fervent interest in digital DJ platforms like Traktor and Serato, and the music making/performing software Ableton Live. The positives of adopting a software approach now vastly outweighs the benefit of sticking with CDs. You can do so much more with these new tools, and ultimately, they offer the artist and DJ many more routes to express their inner creativity.

When you think about it, mixing two records together is not that inspiring artistically, when compared with the new tools that allow you to break down tracks into minutiae parts, and re-construct the world from your own point of view.

In the future, I think we may see two separate DJ ideals form, one group that sticks to the belief that mixing records together to tell a story is the true essence of DJ culture, and another group (which may in time be called digital DJs) that sees technology and music as nothing more than tools, like an alphabet, that enable the DJ to tell their own story in their own words.

Do you think there is a future for vinyl or CD releases, or will it all be digital soon?

Vinyl is a collector’s item, and it will continue to be a collector’s item. But if anything, the digital era represents a changing generation, one that knows, nor appreciates, the concept of physical formats. CDs have never really been part of DJ culture, as they were merely convenient for the early adopters of digital technology.

Can you give an example of an act that broken through on digital sales alone?

Deadmau5 was solely a digital phenomenon, both his product and his profile. He had many No.1s on Beatport before any physical media outlet ever wrote about him, and by then, he already had a huge following that he had built organically through blogs, Beatport’s user base, and social media outlets.

Do you think there is a difference in quality between digital only and physical releases?

Audio tests on the world’s leading club soundsystems have proven that there is no quality loss between WAVs and vinyl/CD. There is some loss in quality between 320kbps MP3s and vinyl, but to most people this is inaudible.

Does the growth of digital mean the loss of a dance/ DJ community hanging out in Soho record shops?

The paradigm has shifted from the local, to the global. DJ communities are no longer tied to physical locations such as record stores, and instead the community is more like a set of lissome sleeper cells connected by core ideals, digital knowledge, and web portals. Electronic music is arguably music for the globalised world, in a sense, the world’s first truly globalised music. And it will continue to evolve at the pace of mankind. Technological determinism in art, doesn’t get any purer than electronic music.

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