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
