Ok guys lets face it.

[TechMouse]

Indeed.

Some of the best sets I've seen over the last year have been people playing with boxes / laptops, as well as CDs and also vinyl. People can do wonderful stuff with all of them, and no doubt someone will be doing something else amazing with equally improbable tools in the years to come.

Exciting innit. ;)

[gumpy green]

Indeed.

Some of the best sets I've seen over the last year have been people playing with boxes / laptops, as well as CDs and also vinyl. People can do wonderful stuff with all of them, and no doubt someone will be doing something else amazing with equally improbable tools in the years to come.

Exciting innit. ;)

yup. and ther will be folk also doing new stuff with deks that cant be done on hardware. ;)

it is looking good.

[dirty_bass]

When anything new comes along it is always resisted.
The internet was said to be rubbish, now look at us, and what a state the postal service is in because of email.
PC`s were poopooed as a production tool, and now loads of top studios are using serious software based set ups.
The car was resisted and now everybody drives.

Change is inevitable.

The signs are all there.
The FACT is that vinyl sales are down across the board.
Distributers are falling down quicker than a bunch of irish sailors on St Patricks day.
Each summer (always a difficult time for vinyl sales) things are getting tighter and tighter.
Yet still people would rather bury their head in the sand rather than except what is happening.
Eventually the current system will no longer be able to sustain itself.
And that means simply that a lot of artists we all love and respect will have to devote their time to something other than making techno music.
Artists need money to survive.

Techno is a progressive music. In all aspects we embrace new technology except with the medium it is transmitted on. Vinyl for gods sake?

Change will happen, and I would dearly love to wake more people up to it, so we can get together and seriously try to work out a way of pushing forward into the digital age in a way that will allow us to continue to do what we do.
At the moment everyone is fighting over a very small market for sales and distribution etc, and like a lake full of fish that is drying up, sooner or later the fish begin to eat each other to make more room.

Sentimentality and resistance will not help. I have sunk a lot of money into vinyl, and it hurts to let it go, but it has to happen.

This doesn`t mean vinyl should be thrown away. But people should realise what is inevitable and embrace it. We can have our cake and eat it, vinyl and a new format can survive together until people make the full transition.

But the fact is we need to start change.

[TechMouse]

But the fact is we need to start change.

... and the rewards will be great for the people who get in there first.

[Francisco Scaramanga]

I play my own tunes off my laptop, but don't have a copy of tractor - I use PCDJ red, which doesent mix them automatically. But I can't be fecked to actally make all the pitch adjustments live, so I have a number of copies of each tune, each one at a certain speed, so if I want to play at 135, all my tunes are already that speed. Or 140, or 145, or whatever, just takes sorting it out ahead of time. People have given me some shit for this in the past (calling me a cheater, etc.), but I always have the same reply - seeing as I am making all the tunes myself, and I have the power to make them easy to mix (making the speeds the same, pre storing cue points, etc.) I would have to be a grade A fool not do this, as it would be making things harder for myself, for no good reason.

I can get the tunes together well quick smart, which means I have spare time, so I can get the fx going, get a third or fourth track going, or sling a bit of drum machine over the top and get ill with the beats (or have a slurp of drink and roll a fag, hehe). Personally I find this much more fun than fecking about trying to get two records in time with each other.

Another thing - I use high quality MP3's as well as wav's, and honestly cannot tell the difference between them. Maybe on some amazing headphones or in some super acoustic listening booth with £10,000 speakers, but to the average ear, as long as your mp3s are of a sufficent quality, I reckon theres no difference.

[dirty_bass]

generally the people who say it`s cheating are the ones who have spent sooo much time learning to mix with vinyl, that it`s all they know and to see someone doing something new and different just narks em.

The art of mixing is not in the mechanical process of getting two pieces of petroleum product to rotate in unison, keeping the audio recording on it in beat sync. That`s something anyone can do with practiice.

The art is in the mix, the choice of tune, the EQing, the mix point, reading the crowd, taking chances with selection etc.

Who cares what process you get the result by.
Personally if the vinyl would get itself in time I would be very happy, cos it gives me more time to do the mixing.

Mobile phones are cheating.
You should travel to see the person you want to talk to and do it face to face.

[detfella]

but there's also art in finding the mix i think, something which ableton doesn't do cos everything can be made to be bang on before the set even starts

it's good to watch people almost lose control of a mix then bring it back

[Francisco Scaramanga]

I don't know alot about ableton, but it looks well interesting, definately someting I'll be looking into soon. But I like being able to have two tracks going through two channels on a mixer so that you can EQ them properly, or drop bits out, or whatever else you might do when mixing records. Maybe abelton does this, I dont know. I would be chuffed if it did though. In the meantime, I love my PCDJ red, its so simple, yet so effective.

[gumpy green]

DB- are vinyl sales down as a whole or is it just "per item" cos i recon sales would be up as a whole from whats going on around me...

but satying that ther are far more folk releasing tracks now so if records sales as a whole were up the individual artist could still be selling less.

i dunno what its like globally but around here i think vinyl is on the up.

i wouldnt say im or others are resisting change either, if i thought cds would be good id be adding it right now to my setup but, as ive said the only thing i can see a use for them for djing is to play my own tracks or stealing folks work.

[dirty_bass]

If sales were on the up distributers wouldn`t be falling down.
Actual volume of sales IS down, distributers don`t care about individual label sales as a rule, it`s the volume to them, as it`s all the same.
So yes there is more stuff, going into a shrinking market.
I`m not saying this for fun, it`s how it is.
Most record shops will say the same thing.

things maybe ok in edinborough by your perception, but edinborough is hardly gonna support the worldwide market.

[detfella]

anyone care to share figures with us? i seem to remember about 5-7yrs ago (head-shit-memory) sales where around 1000-2000 for an average techno release, is that about right?

[g]

you have too many zeros in there now.

[dirty_bass]

I think where once a good release was between 5 and 10 thousand
you are doing very very well now days if you hit 1500

[The Divide]

I tend to think that were not looking deep enough when talking about the recent decline in sales. For me anyways I think there’s a lot more to it than the format its sold on. Instead of blaming the format the 1st thing I would blame is the music, another thing which I feel is often overlooked is the way that it’s promoted/sold online. I don’t know about you guys but these mp3 compression rates aren’t even listenable for me and I don’t blame people for not buying records after listening to those.

I’m all for this digital thing now but I think that more needs to be done to help people purchase music. Simply changing the format isn’t enough for me.

Speaking of which, are there any good online stores which have decent mp3 previews?

[dan the acid man]

Speaking of which, are there any good online stores which have decent mp3 previews?

i cant say ive seen any, although having said that, one local record shop has some of the worst listening stations know to man, with crap headphones, cheap decks powered by crackly amps

[Internal Error Records]

I think where once a good release was between 5 and 10 thousand
you are doing very very well now days if you hit 1500

bare in mind - there are 10 times more producers than 7 years ago.

i will bet dollars to donuts the exact numbers of sales havent changed.

[dirty_bass]

I think where once a good release was between 5 and 10 thousand
you are doing very very well now days if you hit 1500

bare in mind - there are 10 times more producers than 7 years ago.

i will bet dollars to donuts the exact numbers of sales havent changed.

Overall sales have gone down.
OVERALL sales, thats everything, not sales of individual sales of labels.
There aren`t really that many more labels, as loads have disapeared.
The market isn`t that overfilled except in schranze.

And no, it`s not just down to mp3

There are a few other factors. But the Ipod age is the main factor.

Wake up and smell the copy.

Sales in music overall have gone down.
People just want something for nothing.

There is also the fact that DJing simply isn`t as popular as it was.
People now realise that after a few years, they are not gonna be the next tiesto or cox, and they (the bandwagon jumpers) have moved on to some other pipe dream of fame (big brother or something equally trite)

Is there a solution?

I don`t know. I do know that the current system we all use is pretty crap.
The artists get rinsed, returns can give you false sales figures, yadayadayada

We have a method of collective communication now.

And rather than making every excuse under the sun, to deny the facts. We should be sorting it out.

[The Divide]

There is also the fact that DJing simply isn`t as popular as it was.
People now realise that after a few years, they are not gonna be the next tiesto or cox, and they (the bandwagon jumpers) have moved on to some other pipe dream of fame (big brother or something equally trite)

Hahahahaha ****in ell man who you hanging around with? Nasty Nick? :lol:

Most the people I know stopped the djing because of how expensive it became, how there wasn’t much coming out of any interest and because of other life commitments like having kids, working, etc. Me thinks a lot of that’s due to growing up, stopping drugs and other social changes. I wouldnt say the passions gone tho

One thing is for sure, the club scene is definitely taking off this year so far. Im hoping there will be more younger people getting into it. The usual croud is getting a bit old now.

[The Divide]

Well not old old. Just older

[Internal Error Records]

Overall sales have gone down.
OVERALL sales, thats everything, not sales of individual sales of labels.
There aren`t really that many more labels, as loads have disapeared.

ok this has got to be put to an end

quote your source

what is your source for your information?