My need to comply with whatever the latest “challenge” has been thrown down in social media is nil. I have no desire to post my first and last profile pictures on Facebook, or to tell you what the last thing I ate was and that would be my porn star name (fish pie). But the current #10YearChallenge thing (clearly I’m doing it wrong) got my attention, so I decided it would make a decent throwback moment to show how far things have come in a decade of DJ stuff.
Check out this archive page from January 2009 on skratchworx. Luckily, it’s a busy one with NAMM coverage. NI’s Maschine is seen for the first time, as was the Audio 4, a device that funnily enough we were fondling in the Worxlab today. But most importantly, you get a glimpse of the Vestax mixer than never was — the PMC-08Pro2.
It’s interesting to contrast and compare 10 years ago NAMM with what’s happening next week. There’s certainly fewer companies, and they’re bringing out fewer new products too. And one could argue that things haven’t necessarily moved on in a way that a full decade in a rapidly evolving technology led market might imply.
And just for fun, here’s 15 years ago in the skratchworx archive. We’d been running a matter of months at this point, and this is where you’ll see that things have changed significantly. The launch of Scratch Live and the Technics SL-DZ1200 puts this firmly in the realms of ancient history, relatively speaking of course.
Be careful though — a trip down memory lane can turn into a productivity black hole.