Streaming services for DJs are one of those things that seem to make the older heads foam at the mouth. They think the idea is absurd and is somehow an insult to how they used to do things in the 1990s.

Time was you had to curate your own collection of vinyl. You would go to a record shop or several to explore what was out, and to try and find that record which everyone else had somehow managed to miss. Those recommendations by staff at the record stores? They were the curated editorial playlists of their time!

Having curated playlists on digital services is frankly no different. Years ago, the distributors chose what they thought would sell and the shops would choose their stock from the distribution list. How many records in that era missed out as a result? There must be many thousands.

There’s little reason it couldn’t work online. Genre specific curators could sift through the releases that come in, doing much the same as their predecessors. And given that something like 80% of records on Spotify have never been listened to even once, there’s a colossal range of records out there to pick from.

This is the future, whether we like it or not. The other day, my 4 year old son came into my room and saw me checking out a premaster for an upcoming release on my headphones. We got talking, and I explained to him that many years ago, you had to actually go to shops and buy music and bring it home. He struggled to compute this idea.

I then mentioned downloads, which I know is something he understands. He just told me the idea of downloading music was “silly”, and that “you download games and apps, not music!”. This is how the next generation is going to think, and probably how most of the current generation feel too.

If they want to be a DJ, should they really be deprived of the opportunity just because they don’t know their way around a pair of Technics 1210s? That sounds awfully snobbish to me…