New Dog, Old Tricks
The other day I bumped into a friend who I have not seen for a very long time. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, filled in each other ever so briefly on what we have been doing with our lives for the past 20 some odd years and talked about some great memories. During the course of the conversation he tells me that he is a DJ now and having the time of his life “making good money” as he put it. Of course he also mentions that he is using cutting edge technology (a laptop) and has all this music that he got “off the Internet” (MP3s). When I asked him what program he was using he gave me this puzzled look and said…
“I’m using PCDJ Red - what else is there?”
Well I told him that there are quite a few more options out there, naming a few off of the top of my head, then I asked him what version of PCDJ Red he was actually using. After a brief discussion I come to find out that it is PCDJ Red 5.2, a program that has been discontinued for more than 4 years. Knowing that he’s only been a DJ for the last two years, I asked him where he managed to find such an old program. To which he replied that it came with the computer that he bought off of another DJ. All this time I still had not mentioned anything about writing books, etc. for Computer DJs and he continued spilling his guts to me, telling me all about how he’s getting all this great music off of the Internet for free and so on.
Anyway, towards the end of the conversation it came out that he has been having trouble with his laptop lately, citing a number of ailments not the least of which is that the laptop crashes after about 15 minutes of use - which he found out the hard way when he was doing a school dance. I finally let the cat out of the bag about my DJ background, to which he excitedly started asking me a lot of questions. I told him that there were a number of things that were likely the cause, not the least of which was pirated music and most likely pirated software. Of course he had his rationalizations for stealing music and software, but I have heard them all before - it’s still stealing and there is no excuse!
I went on to explain that using sites such as Limewire, Kazaa and God knows what else is out there, opens his computer up to all sorts of computer viruses and so forth. I also explained that if he was using a pirated copy of PCDJ Red that he would also have a number of problems in that regard too. Although I did not even mention the fact that he was using a 10 year old laptop that was cause of some of the problems as well.
I continued explaining a great deal about charging a better rate in order to afford legal copies of his music, legal copies of his software and of course getting something better to use for a CPS. I directed him here to this site as well as referring him to check out the likes of the American Disc Jockey Association, DJ Idea Sharing and the DJ Idea Sharing Podcast Network, the Computer DJ Summit and many of the industry websites such as Mobile Beat, DJ Times, ProDJ, WeDJ, and so on. Then I told him about my book - which was pretty much the end of the conversation.
As I walked away, I shook my head as I thought to myself - he may be a new dog, but it’s the same old bag of tricks. The next thought that popped into my head was that if the new DJs coming into this industry don’t try to learn from the mistakes of the past, they are indeed doomed to repeat them.
Tags: adja, computer dj, computer dj summit, computer djing, digital dj, djis, laptop dj, pcdj red, piracy
