Armin vs Tiësto: Too close to call

Contrary to popular belief that by winning both the 2007 and 2008 DJ Mag title Armin van Buuren is now for a fact the most popular DJ in the world I would dare to dispute that that is actually the case.

Clearly Armin has performed a great sprint to catch up with Tiësto, the guy who personally brought DJ worshiping to the highest level in recorded history. But has he really passed this icon of DJing in popularity?

This week the highly regarded IDMA awards were handed out in Miami at the annual Winter Music Conference. Armin won 4 of his 6 nominations:

- Best European DJ
- Best Radio Mix Show DJ (A State of Trance)
- Best Progressive House/Trance track (In and out of love)
- Best Video (In and out of love)

Tiësto however also won 4 of his 6 nominations and not exactly the small potato ones:

- Best Global DJ
- Best Full Length DJ Mix (In Search of Sunrise 7)
- Best Podcast (Tiësto's Club Life)
- Best Artist

This again confirms how popular Tiësto still is and how mega close the race between him and Armin has been in the past year. The organizer of the DJ Mag award has admitted (in Armin's book) that the difference between Armin and Tiësto for the 2008 DJ Mag title was less than 100 votes. On a total of 350.000 votes that is extremely close. Add to that the fact that Tiësto recently took the Mix Mag Best DJ award and now also the IDMA Best Global DJ award and it is pretty clear that Armin is not a mile ahead in popularity as a lot of people so often seem to think. He has done a great job in catching up, but in terms of popularity they are currently equal at best.

I am not writing this to dis Armin or promote Tiësto for that matter. I’m simply trying to look objectively at what's going on and how people are rating these guys. Personally I am quite critical about Armin's current live sets, but I will still take his over Tiësto's every day. Same goes for his radio show, although this poll does show that Armin's podcast format simply doesn't work and is unworthy of his position, something I've been saying from episode 1.

In terms of the other awards, there are a few that don’t really don’t mean anything to me. Tiësto best artist? What artist?! He hasn’t been an artist for 2 years, just a DJ and a remixer. Best (Progressive) House/Trance Track for In and out of love? That must be a joke. And the Best Video award for that same track should immediately be forwarded to Ne-Yo, because Armin’s vid is an utter ripoff of the one Ne-Yo made his track Closer in early 2008.

I would agree to ISOS7 being a better compilation than ASOT2008, however both fail miserably compared to something like Sasha's Invol2ver. Unfortunately the popular majority yet fails to see the sheer genius behind that compilation and the way it was produced and mixed. I do hope that these guys one day will see that they are wasting their energy and talent on all this endless worldwide touring, doing the same boring live sets over and over again. They would serve their musical legacy and their fans a lot better by spending more time and energy in the studio creating masterpieces that will last forever, instead of blowing it over and over on one night stands for a limited amount of people. I know that that money is a lot greener, but when is green green enough?

Oh well. Looking ahead it will be interesting to see how this develops during 2009 now that Tiësto has broken up with his manager. His gig list looks quite empty atm, but that could also have to do with him wanting to focus on his new artist album. But then again just like Armin's upcoming album it will most likely be too late to be of influence on the 2009 DJ Mag poll.

The future of digital DJing

With the digital music age kicking in in full effect the discussion about DJing with computers will be something that will flame up increasingly in the near future.

In my opinion DJing from behind a notebook doesn't look like DJing anymore, it looks more like you're checking your email or chatting with your honey. Big DJ’s like Armin van Buuren and Tiesto have stated in recent interviews they absolutely do not intend to move into that direction, simply because it looks dumb and they feel it’s embarrassing towards their fans.

And the objections don’t stop just at what it looks like on stage. Software like Ableton Live enables you to pre-program and pre-beatmatch an entire set, making the actual “live” performance nothing more than clicking a few buttons every now and then. In a way the difference to actually playing a studio prepared mix cd becomes very small here.

Part of being a good DJ is being able to perform the music that the crowd you’re playing for wants to hear. From that perspective it shouldn’t matter what technology you use to actually play that music. But the thing is there is more to live DJing than just that.

Today’s DJ is the star on the stage and the people want to see their star in action, which does not mean leaning backward, clicking a mouse every 4-5 minutes and sipping on a Bacardi-Red Bull in the meantime. They want to see hands operating decks, live beat matching and headphones going on and off. They want to see the focus, stress and dedication it takes to make every transition work and the grin of their hero when he kicks in that killer new tune and feels the flow of energy it releases from his fans.

The transition from vinyl to cd’s a few years ago basically has not affected this. Sure, it was argued a lot at the time too that DJing with cd’s was not really DJing, but the advantages of the increased sound quality, reliability, logistics (ever carried a full vinyl bag?) and flexibility to bring the latest stuff straight from the web were simply too big. It was an unstoppable change just as the cd pushed out vinyl for consumers 15 years earlier. The fact that the cd took so long to conquer the DJ-world was purely based on the absence of a logical cd successor to the infamous Technics SL-1200 turntable. But once the marvelous engineers @ Pioneer Electronics managed to recreate the touch and feel of the good ole Technics in their CDJ-1000 there was no going back. A beautiful example of virtualizing manual control through a piece of hardware that basically is the same as the original.

In the upcoming years we will see a similar discussion with the rise of the Macbook with Ableton (or similar) loaded DJ taking on the old school DJ with his CDbag and CDJ-1000’s. The discussion will very probably be much more intense than the vinyl to cd transition one from a few years ago. Because let’s face it, as stated above a DJ standing behind a notebook clicking a mouse to start a new song will be the death of public DJ performance as we know it. It is as boring to look at as a light jockey punching a knob to start a strobe.

However all is not lost. Mankind’s creativity never fails and new devices to bring back the live performance aspect of the DJ, even when his tunes actually are played from spinning hard disks, are on their way. Various companies like Vestax, Numark, Stanton and EKS have already released new devices that allow a DJ to manually control and manipulate digital files being played from a computer in a similar way that an SL-1200 or a CDJ-1000 player works, with a pitch control slider and a physical wheel to mimic the old vinyl.

EKS Otus DJ Controller

Devices like this recreate the show aspect that the DJ is known and loved for. Even better, what they do is almost eliminate the difference between laptop-DJing and cd-DJing. Anyone who has ever used a CDJ or similar device will know that they are actually much more a computer than a cd player to begin with. Sure, you insert a cd, but the first thing the device does is load your track into working memory. Wanna pitch up? It’s not the cd that will spin faster, it’s a piece of built in software that resamples the music file while being read from memory. You grab the control disk to hold the track? It doesn’t stop the cd, it simply stops the playback from memory and resumes as soon as you let go of the wheel. Open up a CDJ and you will basically find the same components that make a professional grade computer. Without realizing it we have already been watching DJ's spinning tunes with computers for a few years.

So there you have it. DJing out of a computer will be a thing of the future. The core issue however is that DJ's need to realize that their manual activities like track selecting, beat matching, starting, stopping and correcting are an essential part of their act and should therefore never be taken over by software.

The cool thing is it doesn’t stop there. Where certain DJ’s have fallen into the trap of using the Macbook/Ableton combo completely automated, others use them to introduce all kinds of real live elements into their sets. Paul van Dyk was one of the first to do this, and DJ Shah has been experimenting with live keyboards in his recent live sets as well. Dirty South from Australia is another fine example of someone who gets creative in his sets, actually live remixing tracks from his sequencer software. All we need now are graphical interfaces to project this cool stuff on video walls so the public can fully enjoy what is going on. We are on our way to live DJ entertainment that’s bigger than ever before.

Ow and talking about creative new directions, check this out :)