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Welcome to the future, where DJs are kneecapped by the cloud libraries they have access to.

To be fair, though, this isn't even nearly as troubling as Beatport et al pushing cloud DJ music subscriptions. There is a whole new generation of "talent" whose literal stage performances are 100% reliant on a good internet connection -- I imagine anyone who has gigged professionally would be horrified!

To me one of the most important attributes of a DJ is their ability to curate and find music that I have never heard before from sources that are new to me. Essential to this is the care and feeding of your own personal music library, in CD/Vinyl/MP3/FLAC/some other unencumbered format. Curating spotify playlists just isn't the same, and serendipitously stumbling on a new track in some random playlist is not nearly as emotionally relevant as discovering some gem on a $2 secondhand whitelabel, or the CD bargain bin at the thrift store, for example. To say nothing of all the unimaginative troglodytes that are simply going to hit up the genre top 10 and add all that to their crates and think they're ready to go.

I shudder to think about what the future of the electronic music underground means with all these cloud zombies running around. These kids know there's no cell service out in the middle of the desert right???

>from sources that are new to me

From a venue perspective you are responsible for acquiring the performance rights for that song. You should know about the sources of the songs else you risk not having the rights to have it played.

And from a practical perspective that is not how it works unless you are in the mainstream. Further, independent labels don't enforce this rule against DJs, and entire scenes thrive without hearing a single track from any of the big music labels.

And besides, good luck asking any of these crews to provide that information, let alone payment. Very few people are making any significant money

Pay-for-performance is bullshit, copyright owners should not have any ability to control how the work is reproduced once it is released to the public.

This quickly brings to mind the recent re-post of this guy's tale of rolling with the punches of iTunes' launch[0] (not to comment on the bit about realtime connectivity).

I presume A->Z is powerful enough to decide to take a shot at snowballing its catalog to critical mass after making the out-of-pocket costs very appealing to artists of all sizes to cough up their discographies.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30613967

>I shudder to think about what the future of the electronic music underground means with all these cloud zombies running around. These kids know there's no cell service out in the middle of the desert right???

Your comment reminded me of an old video that went viral quite a few years back and has since been reposted to infinity. There are still legitimate DJs that focus on the aspects that you care about but I suspect downward pricing pressure have forced the creation of "show" DJs that are just there to play some music for venues that don't really care. Note: I am not in the industry and these are all just second hand observations so I could be totally off the mark.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQOpqJ82EY4

On a side note, do people still run underground raves like the following?

[2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=648UkmmTG5w

WWARNING: LOUD AUDIO

Wonder if there is a market for people to go back to the 80s/90s. We might as well since we might be re-playing the cold war era!

Yeah, stuff like that happens all the time. Warehouse parties, desert parties, forest parties, that scene is alive and well. Hell even the kandy-kid Happy Hardcore 90s raver culture is still going
"licensed music" smh.

you go and either pay for physical discs or pirate the shit out of it because this whole "protecting interests of rights holders" is getting out of hand.

Stationhead (https://www.stationhead.com/) has been something similar for awhile. However, they use Spotify's API to sync your Spotify app with the rest of the listeners on the station.
True story, I am currently working on a music server project which I have tentatively been calling amps. Now I'll need to rename it.
> How would you build your own radio show if there were no satellite towers or recording studios required, no licensing deals to negotiate, and the tools you needed were already on your phone?

Shoutcast?

Jokes on these tries, I listen to mix/radio to discover music that is usually out of streaming platform pool. Good luck.