Today’s headline news is all about a David and Goliath moment that saw a slip of a girl stand up to a 100,000 strong army. Yes, for Taylor Swift succinctly put Apple in its place by telling them that they were bang out of order for expecting the little guy to subsidise their new Apple Music streaming venture for three months. And she won, because Apple announced today that while we’ll still get a three-month free trial, artists will get paid. Say what you like about her, Taylor Swift made the colossus that is Apple do a u-turn, and that my friends is real power that few can yield.
ONE YEAR ON
All this chatter about streaming made me think about just how much our music consumption habits have changed, and in particular how it is impacting on the DJ ritual. A year ago, I wrote about this very subject, but that’s a long time in this game, and has seen a lot happen as far as streaming goes. So it’s time to see how things have moved on, not just in the industry, but also in the DJWORX community.
RECAPPING
A large part of what we DJs do is based around finding and buying music. Traditionally we have built quite a collection of physical music, and in more recent times kept the lights on at Western Digital by constantly filling hard drives with music that we downloaded, hopefully after buying first.
But we are approaching a new and scary age, one that potentially sees us having no media whatsoever, with no IKEA Expedit or hard drives necessary in this scary streaming brave new world. We will be playing music without actually ever seeing in physical or digital form.
Spotify has since made its way in algoriddim’s djay, and Mixvibes Cross works with Soundcloud. VirtualDJ has worked with streaming services for a while now. So it’s clear that there is a place for it, and for me it’s just a matter of time before NI and Serato deliver something along these lines as well, via the likes of Beatport or some proprietary service — Serato Whitelabel Cloud anyone?
PLAYING DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
This has led my mind to ponder the immediate future, and especially how new DJs will influence the DJ ritual. Just as CD saw off vinyl, and MP3s killed off CDs, streaming has the potential to introduce the next revolution in DJing. And it’ll be driven by those for whom buying music in any form is old hat.
So when you combine a generation of people not buying music anymore with the ease with which you can stream music from anywhere, there is a potential for DJing to become a profession where we no longer own our music at all. Apple Music’s inevitable ubiquity may well be the catalyst for streaming to become a real part of the DJ scene.
The real success will be if you can get all of those obscure edits and remixes. But nobody said you have to stream exclusively — that’s merely a human reaction when something new comes along. All technologies work quite happily side by side without excluding others, so you can still play vinyl alongside streamed music.
IT’S A MATTER OF TRUST
Given my age, it’s obvious that I lean towards preferring something physical to handle when DJing, if only because I like to have something to show for my money. But it’s tough to put my trust in computers to deliver files from a hard drive, so the very though of trusting telecommunications to deliver music to my laptop fills me with utter dread. Engineers strive to remove moving parts from machines to improve reliability, but we seem hellbent on making the chain weaker with each digital revolution of DJing.
To be clear — I’m not a Luddite who only uses hot stamper vinyl and only on Technics. I’m happy to fire up Spotify and listen to a massively diverse range of music, and if the mood takes me mix streamed music in djay. And if I come across something fresh to my ears that I really like, I’ll fork out cash to buy it. For me, streaming provides cost-effective background noise and is a discovery tool as well. But for me, it’ll never replace the ritual of tracking down and building a physical music collection. Who knows though — if I can suddenly get all the music I need with high quality audio with rock solid streaming for a tenner a month, wouldn’t I be mad to say no?
WHAT ABOUT YOU?
What are your streaming habits? And how do you feel about paying a monthly subscription instead of an actual purchase? Are you a new DJ who only uses streaming for music? Ultimately, do you see streaming for DJs gathering acceptance in the near future?
WHAT ABOUT YOU?