When is a DJ a real DJ?

What this lesson teaches

This is a one-minute video that asks a question and walks away from it. Somebody buys a mixer, two turntables and a pile of music. Are they a DJ when they get home? After a month? After a gig? He puts it to the viewer and leaves it there.

That is the right thing for him to do and the wrong place for us to stop, so here is the answer.

One word doing two jobs

Almost every argument about who counts as a real DJ is two people answering different questions and assuming they are disagreeing.

The first question is descriptive. What is this person doing? Playing recorded music for other people to listen to. That is the whole of it, and the answer has nothing to do with skill. Buying the gear makes you the owner of some gear. Playing to a room, even a bad room, even badly, makes you a DJ in the only sense the word originally had.

The second question is about competence, and it is the one people actually care about. It is never settled by equipment, by how long you have owned it, or by what you call yourself.

When the two get mixed, you get the bedroom DJ with three days' experience announcing he is a DJ - true, and not the claim he thinks he is making - and the veteran telling him he is not - false, and not the objection he thinks he is making.

A test that does not mention gear

If you want a competence test that survives scrutiny, it is not about hardware and not about years. It is this: can you still do the job when the conditions are not the ones you practised in?

Somebody else's mixer, laid out differently. A room that wants something other than the set you planned. A player that dies in the middle of a track. A request you hate from the person paying you.

Anyone can play a good set on their own equipment, in their own room, with their own music, to nobody. That is a necessary skill and it proves very little. Everything that makes somebody reliable is in the gap between that and a real night.

Why this is not just bar-room argument

The question has one practical edge, which is money.

Taking a booking is a promise that a room full of people will have music all night. The honest moment to start making that promise is not when you can play a good set - it is when you can recover from the thing that goes wrong. Those are different dates, often a year apart, and the gap between them is where most of the horror stories live.

So call yourself a DJ as soon as you are DJing; nobody owns the word and gatekeeping it is a waste of everyone's evening. Just be slower about calling yourself one who can be booked.