Pioneer CDJ Guidebook: A Comparison and History of CDJs and XDJs
passionatedj.com
passionatedj.com
They let us playing on 2 cdjs 1000, with an Allen Heat mixer. Deadmau5 was the most played there, 2010 was an amazing year for electronic music. People kept increasing, things started breaking and we had to find something else. I've worked an entire summer 10 hours per day to afford two CDJ 900, then I bought a Reloop DJM and started organizing parties.
Those years will always remain in my heart. The energy, the people, I just think that some experiences will stay within your soul for the rest of your life. But if there's something I'll never understand is why the business world behind music and entertainment in general is so rot and broken. Maybe drugs, maybe the desire to get easy money, most of the people involved in parties just want to squeeze people for money, from location owners to PRs. If you don't have the guts to enter this "Mors tua Vita mea" cycle you're getting ripped off and left behind.
Your only hope was finding those two or three trusted friends and fight together against the rest of the world, until the last breath.
God, I miss those times.
With that out of the way, what are you selling, in music? You can sell recordings, but Spotify has made that pretty difficult, and even without Spotify, the margins are surprisingly bad because of all the middlemen. So mostly you're selling live performances, i.e., parties.
Some people go to the party for the music, some people go there to dance, and many people go to get high and/or get laid. The people who love music and the people who love dancing will come back often, and that's not a problem. But the people who show up to get high either don't do it very often, or they're a problem. The people who show up to meet somebody either then date that person for a while or are sex addicts. So again, they either don't do it very often, or they do, and that's a problem.
So there's the demand side of the equation. There's a small number of customers you can build an ongoing relationship with, and a larger number with whom you can't. Let's look at supply. Here it's the same story as it is with movies or TV: there are tons and tons of people who want to do it and are willing to take a financial loss in order to do so. So until you get to a level where you can charge a lot of money, you're stuck at a level where you can hardly charge at all. That phase can last for years, even decades.
If you want to instead consider promoters and event organizers the supply side, everything I said about the customers applies to them as well.
So there you have it. It's a brutally tough business for most people and a cakewalk for a lucky few.
To this day, I still prefer to play vinyl. There's just something about putting your hands directly on the medium. Yes, needles, scratches, pops, dust, all degrade the sound blah blah, but I still love it regardless.
I can either use DVS to "simulate" vinyl (laptop required), use actual vinyl or plug in several USBs.
Are people using CDs and these devices commonly today?
For house, techno, drum and bass, etc I typically see a lot of Pioneer gear, used with digital storage, not CDs. I still see Technics turntables too, but with real vinyl, depending on the DJ. The vast majority of the stuff I listen to doesn't involve scratching / DMC-style turntablism though.
Nowadays you still see folk using Serato/Traitor for sure, but - at least within the dance music community - regular vinyl or USB/CDJ (or often a combo of both) are the most common formats you'll see.
1210s (older MK2/3/5 or the newer MK7) are very expensive so its a huge call for someone to start with a pair of these (plus the additional expense of a mixer, needles and records).
[1] https://www.pioneerdj.com/en-au/product/all-in-one-system/xd...
[2] https://www.pioneerdj.com/en-au/product/controller/ddj-400/b...
I’ve been out of the game a long time. I have a pair of SL 1200 MK2s in the original boxes (boxes beat to hell, they were my only cases) in my moms attic.
They were expensive new, I picked up a djm-500 at the same time. Looking at eBay, they don’t seem to have appreciated much in value, if anything gone down given inflation.
It was all thanks to a summer job at Intel between my first and second years at college. Blew a ton on this setup!
I'm surprised, but not that surprised.
I still have my pair of 1210s I bought in 1996 I think. I dragged those to regular small bar gigs 2 or 3 nights a week for about 4 years when I first left uni.
They're still rock solid and work just like new. Whenever I think of good design the Technics SL1200 comes to mind.
The flight cases, however, are up in the loft and stink of cigarette smoke. Seems now crazy to think people used to smoke in pubs.
> Seems now crazy to think people used to smoke in pubs.
It was crazy and reckless but also interesting to have experienced if only for a relatively short period of time. (presuming no obvious personal long term impacts)
I presume we’ll feel the same about alcohol in a few decades. It’s a rather blunt instrument with which to alter consciousness. And it has a lot of unfortunate outcomes.
I’m using Beatport Link for my music which is incredible, but it doesn’t match vinyl shopping and really getting to know your tracks, as I already have 200 songs in various playlists and barely know the names of any of them.