I would like to define what being a DJ is all about. I have been in the industry since 1977, have worked in clubs, on the private party circuit doing everything from teenage birthday parties, to 21st parties, weddings, anniversaries and everything else they ask us to do as well as performing in live outdoor events at dance festivals as well as with bands, playing in their breaks when they are taking a break. I have heard in the last few years the terms....Club DJ, virtual DJ, and here Asia the term Digital DJ. Now there is a difference as to what DJ's do these days. As an individual I started in music aged 4 and was playing in a band by the time I was 6 years old....I played in bands untill I was 16 years old when I decided....why do we practise songs we hear on records, and try and play and sing them like the original artist, and we never get those songs right. Meanwhile I started playing records between the band breaks during those years and was getting better response from the people at those dances. As a band we did best with our original material. A few years of this I sought out a DJ company and started working with that company. Over the last 10 years we have seen the techniques of DJ work change, originally we would 'beatmix' and get similar dance songs to keep the beat going. Then scratch mixing came on the scene, and the different genres of dance music have formed, house.....hip hop.....drum and bass..etc.

And we now have 'digital DJ's who are using samples and beats to create their own tracks...that they promote as their own pieces of work and who even get involved in producing tracks to show off what they can do. No way are these new Digital DJ's paying homage to the original artists who created the dance tracks, but they are now creating their own tracks in competition. I would actually consider this latest form of work not so much DJ work but Digital Composing and as such these people should be called exactly that...Digital Composers, leaving the old skool DJ's like myself and thousands of others the job of playing Dance tracks and mixing and getting the beats right using tracks made by musicians, using what ever medium we want, be it MP3 files on computer based systems, CD's and Vinyl on conventional audio mixers and what ever else we can find to use to keep the party dancing.....all comments most welcome

i'm an old skool DJ myself. I'm been thinking of using my wifi system in my laptop to download music on location, instead carrying all my music with me. Is this going to be a problem down the road, is it even legal?