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Tuesday, 03 May 2005 |
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Online mixes have deformed my listening habits beyond all expectations. As a dance music fan trapped in club-free suburbia, consuming music one song at a time wasn't just frustrating: It was antithetical. You could rely on the slow trickle of properly licensed CD mixes throughout the year. Or you could listen to the tracks individually, a bit like cutting paragraphs from a book. With some genres, like grime and leftfield jungle, the mixes never came at all.
Now, with a little searching, I can find thousands of mixes. They range from current transmissions from East London and Cologne, to scratchy disco tapes from the dawn of DJ mixing. I have sets from Derrick May at the Music Institute in 1987, '96 Metalheadz Blue Note sessions, and 2005 dubplate selections from guys I've never heard of. With high-speed connections, cheap server space, large capacity email, and near terrabyte-sized hard-drives, it's a growing market. Some weeks, I find myself listening to almost nothing but.
Despite the legal/ethical quandary that mp3 file sharing throws up, everyone seems to give DJ mixes a free pass. Producers are always quick to poo-poo mp3s, but will add an aside that p2p servers are great for tracking down old club sets. But then the DJ mix(tape) has always had a tenuous relationship with legality, even as it's driven the growth of the industry, from the first reel-to-reel disco mixes right up through CD-R's. Even major labels turn a (mostly) blind eye, given that the culture is based on people playing records they didn't make, press, or release, for a paying audience. (And now that dance is dead as a mainstream, commercial property, there's plenty of neo-pub rock to worry about.)
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