DJing in the 21st Century

The Internet has changed the way DJ's work and perform for better or for worse, depending on how you look at it. With the ominous nature of the internet, self-promotion has become an activity that practically anyone who can invest some time and effort in can perform, especially for DJ's who are looking for bookings. From a basic MySpace page that displays your profile to a full blown, professionally produced homepage that houses your mixtapes, samples of tracks that you're producing and other things pertinent to the professional DJ.

Aside from being a marketing platform that's available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the Internet also gives the DJ a remarkable vehicle for music and content delivery. With sites such as Beatport that allows you to sample tracks and download them on demand, the possibilities for discovering new music when you wake up and including them in your set later that evening are immense and deeply profound. Imagine lugging your laptop to the next party and connecting to the in-house wireless connection, logging in to Beatport and downloading tracks on the fly (maybe even a few requests!) as you switch back to your DJing software like Traktor which you control with a myriad of endless rotary knobs and faders without labels, constantly gazing in loving attention to that eerily well-lit LCD screen instead of the crowd.

This very exciting and very nerdfuture-like scenario is also the one that simply puts off a lot of DJ's. There is something to be said about holding the music that you play, such as with vinyl, instead of mixing a digital file that exists only on your hard drive. And let's not even go through the idea of comparing a wall full of vinyl you've collected over the years and 320 gigs worth of club material on your backup hard disk!

There are better options to mixing MP3's such as using a hardware/software hybrid that allows you to control them with actual vinyl records (e.g. Serato) instead of just using a mouse and a midi controller, but there really is something about having all that technology away from your face and the crowd's while they watch you digging through a crate of vinyl that you've brought along especially for them that night. While I am not doubting the practical aspects of using MP3's in a Djing scenario, I'm not praising them either. I'm currently using both digital and vinyl, and I've got to say that DJing while focusing on your laptop just isn't as fun as going through your vinyl or even your CD's at a gig.