to achieve slip-cueing and beat-matching to create a continuous blended sound from track to track—and keep the dance floor jumping and writhing.

I suspect Grasso was also the first DJ whom people liked to watch perform his craft. These days events are held to show off the performance, the art, of DJing. Instead of dancing, the crowd orients to the DJ, standing like rows of sunflowers facing the sun. As stated in the 2001 Doug Pray documentary “Scratch,” “DJs manipulate time and sound with their hands.” And as they manipulate time

and sound through ever more
sophisticated technologies, they
also manipulate our mood.
DJ/club culture is in some
ways synonymous with the mix-
ing of technology, music, and
art. But what is the role of the
Internet in this world?

Unsurprisingly, all good DJs worth their salt have websites. And MySpace accounts. And Facebook presences.

Internet music search also has its place. As with most artistic ventures, the obscure has an allure; finding an obscure track that can be reborn as a break in a mix is part of the practice of being a really good DJ. Online

search is a cheap analogue, the couch-potato version of “crate digging”—that is, checking record stores, flea markets, or thrift shops for second-hand music on vinyl.

For us listeners and fans, we all know the Internet is about buying, ripping, and sharing music. If you haven’t heard of an MP3, and/or heard an aspiring band’s tracks on MySpace, and/or shopped in the i Tunes store, and/or listened to Internet radio, and/or listened to a music podcast, and/or watched a music video on YouTube, and/ or heard all the grumblings about music and copyright and the Internet—well, you must be living under a rock. And then there are audio podcasts and video performances and “ battles” in which the fleet-fingered of the DJ world compete and entrance us.

But beyond that, my colleagues Ayman Shamma, Matt Fukuda, and Nikhil Bobb and I have been looking at how DJs are also using live synchronous webcasting connections to reach

• Y!Live users include DJs, who interact with their audience via webcams and chat while broadcasting live music.

and connect with new audiences.

Yahoo!’s experimental video broadcasting platform, Y!Live, was launched on February 6, 2008. With Y! Live, anyone with a webcam can stream live video of themselves to anyone who wants to tune in and watch/ listen. There are features for personalizing information about yourself as the broadcaster, and there are options for social features, including a chat room. Unlike other similar services, viewers can also webcast. Given this ability for the viewer to stream live, there is a nice blurring of the traditional distinction between one to many and many to many. If you want to broadcast, you sign up for a channel, set up your camera, and off you go: You’re streaming live.

Webcasting in general is not new; some claim the first radio station in the world to broadcast its signal over the Internet was WXYC, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on November 7, 1994. Wikipedia tells us that the growth of webcast traffic has roughly doubled, year on year, since 1995 ascribing this pattern of increase to the uptake of broadband penetration. Reports state that the Live8 (AOL) benefit concerts in July 2005 claimed approximately 170,000 concurrent viewers (up to 400 Kbit/s). That same month the BBC saw similar numbers ( 10 Gbit/s) on the day of the London bombings. Virtually all major broadcasters have webcasts; even the Vatican has a webcast. And I hear that the funeral industry is starting to rake in profits by providing webcasts of funerals.

Webcasting technologies
are extremely easy to use and