Keep Hard Copies of the DJ Music You Own Dont Fall for the Convenience of the Cloud and Streaming

0:00 Vinyl collection, were, taken away

First of all ladies and gentlemen, yes the kitchen's a mess but you know what? It's lived in, it's used. This is not the sort of kitchen with a microwave that just heats up pizzas. I make food. Anyway, put that aside, this video could be very very important to you and I have talked about this before but from a DJ myself who has been in the industry for a very very long time what I think is happening is you are being, or you're having your music taken away from you. Underneath your very noses you are having the things that you love, or the music, the style that you love, taken away from under, like I said, your very nose and you don't even know it's happening. Even if you've got an amazing collection, it's not yours. I will explain.

And hopefully... This may resonate inside those brain cells you've got. So when we go back 20 or 30 years, or even 40 years, everyone had a vinyl collection and in fact... You were guaranteed pretty much to have a completely different vinyl collection to the person next door to you. In fact, I would hazard a guess to say that it was more than, it was practically unlikely that someone else would have an identical vinyl collection to you unless they were some sycophantic kind of like crazy person who happened to just buy every single copy that you bought. And you had something, you owned something, it was yours. It was physical, it was tactile. You could open the cover, you could see, you could smell the vinyl.

2:34 Hard drive, copy

It was yours. Then of course we had CDs and everyone decided to buy CDs. Of course there were cassettes as well. Sure enough. A lot of people decided to get rid of their vinyl collection because CDs were a lot easier to carry around. It's a lot different carrying around a small compact disc compared to a large piece of vinyl. Many reasons as well, because the vinyl after a certain amount of time you'd get crackles and pops whereas the CD was CD quality. I remember back in the day, Radio One, they used to have a little jingle that said CD. It was seriously, there would be a little jingle that said CD and they'd play a track just saying to you guess what this isn't vinyl, this is CD. And then of course the MP3 came along and hard drives and WAV and so on.

So everyone then and now as well, we are now at the tipping point where we're going from another, we're going into another form of transition which I will talk about in a bit. MP3, so of course you chuck a load of tunes on your hard drive and now we're getting to the stage where people have got similar folders and similar sort of music. I want to say music styles but it's so easy nowadays to just whip your mate a couple of pints, give them a few quid and then you can copy their hard drive of a thousand tracks. That's why DJs are more likely to have copies of another DJ's collection. Because they've just basically copied them. But you see what's happening now, we're going through another transition of the system is going well there's no need to actually have a physical copy because now you can have it in the cloud.

4:24 Future, thumb drive

Yes, you don't even have to hold it because isn't it so much easier to go on holiday, to sit in the bath, to drive your car and you don't have to take your complete vacation. You can just listen at your leisure to whatever you want so you don't even need vinyl. You don't even need CDs, you don't even need a hard drive or a thumb drive and have you noticed a lot of computers you buy now don't even have a disk drive. Now that may save space, it may save battery life but also it means you can't burn anything to disk and have a backup, a hard copy. So, when I say I predict what scares me is in the future the likes of you not myself will be so happy with yourself. Pat yourself on the back because you'll go out to a gig with your laptop with a small SSD with I don't know 500GB of storage with all your programs on it

And guess what you'll be using 5G or 25G by then and your head will explode. Um... And you'll have all the music online but the trouble is it's not yours, you don't own it. If you think you own it and if the system says it's yours, you paid your money, don't worry it's yours, you can have it when you want and they make you believe you own it then you're a fool, you're an absolute idiot because no sooner has you... I'll start again. You can get it really quickly but also they can take it away from you even quicker, they can just press a button and all of a sudden your account's gone. You can't listen to the music anymore, it's finished, it's over for you, alright? This is why I bang on to so many people, try and have hard copies of your music

Even if it's just MP3s on a thumb drive because I have this prediction that in 10 years time people will be looking back going what, you use MP... you've got a thumb drive? You've got an... why do you want that? Just think. And also, please put a comment. I would love to have your thoughts on this matter. What do you think? Are you an old school DJ? Have you still got your vinyl? Did you get rid of your vinyl? Have you got a whole bunch of CDs? Did you get rid of your CDs? Are you a new up and coming DJ who would like to buy vinyl? Like to buy CDs? Do you want to burn to disc? Do you want to get vinyl? Do you want to get cassettes? Or are you happy with just streaming, downloading from the web and that's how you feel the future will be

And I'm just talking a load of crap? What do you think? What do you know? Please put it in a comment because myself along with every single other person would like to know what the heck is going on and what the future has for us. Thank you for watching. Practice and enjoy. Thank you.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.