itunes killed the DJ

Remember Napster? I was a sophomore in college and after spending all of my freshman year trying to untap the secrets of scour exchanges a sudden flash of technological ingenuity enters and suddenly everyone has access to a massive library of music for FREE!!!

Within a week I downloaded almost a thousand songs! It was the greatest feeling to have access to any song I ever wanted! I should mention that my musical knowledge before this time was limited to Hip Hop, Freestyle and House. I also knew a lot about Salsa, but I was resistant to liking the music until I took Jazz History. With this said just an idea of the music I had never heard before included Bob Marley, Radiohead, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane... you get the point... I didn't know much about music...

So sometime after the frenzy of downloading that began instantly, the schools began to tighten their bandwidth and it wasn't long before a block was placed on Napster. The RIAA stepped in with guns drawn and tried to stop p2p sharing by any means necessary! Even if it meant filing lawsuits against 12 year old kids... What was the world coming to?

So as we all stood back watching the RIAA go ape-shit trying to shut down Napster and the emergence of new p2p sharing sites, a man by the name of Steve Jobs was quietly designing a strategy of his own. While the first ipod was released in 2001 and its success almost instantaneous, everyone was pleased that they could now take all their illegally acquired music and put it on this wonderful portable player!

The itunes store was launched in April 2003, two years after the introduction of the ipod. Coupled with Apple's branding power and the inclusion of the audio app with every single mac sold made this a winning combination. Before you know it mp3's were becoming increasingly more difficult to acquire and the RIAA struck deals with the courts to facilitate rulings in favor of copyright infringement. Mp3's were available on itunes for just 99 cents each, the pricing was decent and brand loyalty united Apple users with a very simple and easy to use music purchasing system.



CD sales continued to slump horrifically and the RIAA continued to cry out bloody murder as mp3 sales went through the roof. 70 million songs were bought off of itunes within the first year of its launch! Consequently mp3 sales have steadily risen exponentially and as of 2009, itunes has sold over 6 billion mp3s!!! Apparently not enough to balance the market, record stores seem to be the only real industry feeling it the most, HMV and Tower Records have gone out of Business and as of May both Virgin Megastore locations in New York will be closed.

With rising mp3 sales and music shops out of the way theres nothing stopping the demand for good quality singles and the music industry will have to stop being lazy on 2/3rds of the albums right? Wishful thinking on my part... During the days of Napster, computer hard drives weren't so big, so the audio files had to be compressed into tiny audio files that could fit on your computer. Mp3s were converted with a quality so low that distortion and poor audio quality became normal sounding nothing like the original recordings on Vinyl or CD.

Apple's itunes provides "CD quality" mp3s at 192kbs (kilobits per second), so all of the music sold on itunes was set at that rate by default. This sample rate is great for listening to your music through your headphones or through a small stereo, but when you have been exposed to poor quality mp3s for the past few years everything still sounded like a step up.

How does this effect most people? Most people don't care, but then again how many people play music through a 2000 watt amplifier? The marvels of technology now allow you to use real turntables to DJ the music right off of your laptop. Great tool... but... I among many others found myself with poor sounding mp3s...

Other sites like beatport.com and turntablelab.com sell higher quality mp3 for DJs that are encoded at 320kbs and higher for a premium price tag, $1.99+ or as a wave file for $2.49+. Spring extra for the larger file! When I import a CD as full sized files data gets converted to 1411kbs! Thats about 4 times the minimum DJ standard of 320kbs! Why does it cost so much to get half-assed audio quality?

Does it stop there? Is an actual CD quality enough for really big sound? There's no question it will do the job in most big clubs, but what about when you really push it? The top choice is vinyl. Amazingly, as technology has advanced, audio quality has gone down... Without a doubt analog records have superior sound.


The best bet to capture the highest quality and preserve memory space would be to use a format called f.l.a.c. (free lossless audio codec).

Unfortunately itunes is NOT compatible. With increasing hard drive space availability (via external drives) it would be advisable to begin archiving full digital files as .wav or .aiff audio files to preserve full quality that was once impossible with smaller hard drives.

One thing is for sure, it hurts that I have invested so much time, money and energy trusting Steve Jobs can deliver quality products it seems that he and the RIAA have the last laugh as I run to the last remaining record shops to repurchase music I already own to provide the sound quality I need to DJ a party...

As cool as Serato is, if you wanna play with big sound, you're going to have to stick to CD's or vinyl. So save a record shop today, go out and buy a CD or record rather than downloading bad quality mp3s. And if you happen to have a crate of records laying around somewhere, shoot me an email, I'm in the market. =)