Of Course It’s A Great Mix, It’s Beatmatched Perfectly!

Imagine your cell phone contract is up, and you're due for an upgrade.

Since you haven't been keeping up with the latest in mobile technology, you decide to walk into your carrier's retail store to window-shop.  You figure that you'll be able to ask one of the employees all of the important questions in order to make a good decision.

And you run into the worst, most out-of-touch phone salesman in the history of phone sales.

“What can I help you with, today?” he says, with exaggerated enthusiasm.

You explain that you're due for a phone upgrade, but you weren't really sure what model to get.

“Oh, I have the perfect phone for you.  It is made of extremely high-quality plastic.”

You think that's an odd feature to spotlight, but in the interest of politeness, you ask to see the phone he is suggesting.

“It's a great device.  It has a perfectly straight and centered logo on the back, and an extremely responsive accelerometer which allowed it to switch between portrait and landscape modes with low latency.”

Now you're starting to get confused.  You can't remember the last time you saw a crooked logo on a mass-produced phone.  You also can't ever remember thinking, “I'm so glad this phone switches orientation in 2 ms”.

“It even sends text messages, and makes phone calls with very adequate sound quality.”

After 5 minutes, you realize that the sales rep has only been rattling off the qualities of every phone you have ever owned or known of.  A company wouldn't survive in 2014 if they sold phones that faded in the sun, couldn't send texts, and had speakers so bad that it made people unintelligible.

“And there aren't even any typos in the manual!”

These days, quality is not considered remarkable.  Quality is a given.

The same is true of today's DJs.  It is no longer enough to say, “My sets are well beatmatched”, “my music has excellent sound quality”, or “I have the rarest tracks”.  Those points have little meaning nowadays.  They are standard.

So what does the DJ do in order to be remarkable?  Three things: delights the dancefloor, connects with their fans, and surprises their audience.

All three of those things have a lot more to do with psychology than technical skill.

Just a thought for those that like to say, “I'm a DJ, not an iPod“, but haven't ever really thought about why.