If there’s one thing that Ears To The House believes in more than anything else, it’s a sense of fair play. We don’t really care if one person or twenty were involved in the production of a song – all that matters is everyone who worked on it being credited and compensated correctly.

Unfortunately, this common sense belief is one that apparently puts us at odds with much of the industry we write about – the depressingly long list of people not credited or paid for their work is testament to this. For every well-known example, such as Martha Wash effectively being whitewashed out of Black Box videos, there are many others that have never been documented publicly.

As time has gone on, changes in the industry have meant DJs have had to become producers to survive – few DJs nowadays can be booked at a higher level if they have no music they can call their own. Again, this isn’t something that Ears To The House has a problem with if everyone is credited and paid properly.

Yet this week, Defected managed to show yet another example of how important singers really are in dance music – and how irrelevant DJs can end up looking in comparison. Take this clip showing Irish singer-songwriter Yasmine Byrne – known by the stage name Jazzy – singing “Giving Me” to a large audience earlier this year…

The song did well – it made the number one slot in Ireland, whilst it peaked at number three in Britain’s charts. “Giving Me” was a record that Byrne made in collaboration with Belters Only – a DJing duo from Dublin, who say in interviews that they’ve known Byrne for several years.

Now, we don’t question the amount of work everyone put into “Giving Me” here – but when the camera only briefly focuses on the two DJs simply waving their arms about pointlessly in the background whilst the real star of the show does the work, it’s really another reminder that DJs, more collectively speaking, have nothing without great singers…