I was at a party to celebrate a couple of friends’ 40th birthdays on Saturday night at a bar in North London, and Chris (one of the birthday boys, and someone I’ve known since school) asked if I would DJ for a bit. I was never a “DJ” DJ, but in my 20s spent many a happy evening playing tunes, usually in what was referred to as the “chill-out room” whilst ghastly hard house played elsewhere in the venue.
I was never a vinyl DJ – I never really bought a lot of vinyl even in the years before CD – but in the 1990s used CD decks which kind of suited the style of DJing I did (stick one song on after another – nowt fancy).
I saw a TV news clip recently which said that vinyl was more popular now that it has been for years: from the DJ booth on Saturday night, you wouldn’t have known it. Two Technics SL1200 record decks, the iconic DJ tools, being used as laptop stands. The bitter irony…
(In fact, there were also a pair of Pioneer CD decks there too, and they didn’t get a look in all night – it’s just that they weren’t big enough to use to rest a laptop).
This is consumerisation and commoditization in action: relative cheap, generic devices with software apps being used to replace specialist software and hardware.
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One of the biggest attractions of this approach is the ability to carry around 100s or 1000s of tunes which was impossible back in the day with vinyl. Also organising your music for easy quick access is also possible in theory – not yet used any of these systems. The purist (the “DJ” DJ will say it’s not the same) the touch and feel of plastic the weight of a 1210 along with it’s imperfections means you require skill to pull it off. Products such as the Serato allow the use of specially encoded vinyl to be used as the control device which allows for a blend of both worlds.
However that’s not really the point you are trying to make. Agree that cheap computers and fast internet has made it easy to produce, manipulate, share, and play back music. I’m surprised that the iPod hasn’t replaced the SL1210 as the standard interface at clubs.
When new media formats emerge, it’s often the case that the old will reform themselves to better suit the new environment… when the TV came along, cinema didn’t die, but the newsreel became an irrelevant format (and B-movies became “straight to TV” fodder).
Vinyl undoubtedly is going to stick around for a while yet because of the tactility of the medium for DJing (I get that – I just never had the vinyl collection to make it viable for me!). Serato is the sort of way that that is happening. DJ CD Decks, though, are surely confined to the big bin of history…
Agreed!
Also “disc” in general is on it’s last legs. The movie industry and manufacturers should have had the vision to stick their money into on demand type services!
I refuse to purchase anything on disc these days!
That’s interesting… actually, the record industry *did* try to push on-demand services early on with PressPlay and MusicNet. The trouble was that the industry polarized across the two services, the DRM used across them was different, and digital audio players couldn’t access them… in the early noughties the net result was that Apple and iTunes cleaned up.
Reading about all of this at the moment in Charles Arthur’s book Digital Wars…