Dude, I was using Virtual DJ (which became AtomixMP3, and then Atomix Virtual DJ) literally 20 years ago. Got grandfathered into an amazing license that gives me free upgrades for life...
There's not really much new since then. Oh, sure, more effect plugins (gimmicks), better sound quality and stretching, better looping, but overall it's the same damn thing with slight improvements now and again. The problem is not the tools, or even necessarily the interface; the problem is thinking that DJ culture is going to "change".
See, you've got your technically talented DJs, and you've got your just-hit-play-and-dance DJs, and ultimately 99% of the people in the crowd cannot tell the difference. Success for the DJ themselves is based on networking and promotion, not the actual music; trendsetting / tastemaking is largely independent of what's actually being produced. Otherwise, would such bland music _still_ be their stock in trade? People want to dance, give them what they want.
Hoping for better in this industry is kinda pointless.
Another way to think about it is that the contemporary dance sound is determined by whatever the hot gear is, and not by the artists using it(because they are disposable figureheads).
And the gear market itself, well, it's also looking out for number one here. Most of what one needs for any traditional music style - and hence, caters to all the session players that provide the real technical skills - is covered
by the big manufacturers with a workstation keyboard or equivalent multi-gigabyte sample library. The remainder has to exist on being a "cool toy", and there are a lot of ways to be a cool toy, but most of them involve providing a lot of presets so that DJs that do not know what a "major chord" or a "filter cutoff" is can still sound like heroes. Alternately, the cool toy can replicate a grody 40-year-old analog signal path so that anyone who lusts after yesteryear's gear can have the same sound without the space or costs involved in having the real equipment.
Among those three markets, space for defining really new sounds and styles in the form of a product is limited, but it does keep happening year-over-year.
Dude, I was using Virtual DJ (which became AtomixMP3, and then Atomix Virtual DJ) literally 20 years ago. Got grandfathered into an amazing license that gives me free upgrades for life...
There's not really much new since then. Oh, sure, more effect plugins (gimmicks), better sound quality and stretching, better looping, but overall it's the same damn thing with slight improvements now and again. The problem is not the tools, or even necessarily the interface; the problem is thinking that DJ culture is going to "change".
See, you've got your technically talented DJs, and you've got your just-hit-play-and-dance DJs, and ultimately 99% of the people in the crowd cannot tell the difference. Success for the DJ themselves is based on networking and promotion, not the actual music; trendsetting / tastemaking is largely independent of what's actually being produced. Otherwise, would such bland music _still_ be their stock in trade? People want to dance, give them what they want.
Hoping for better in this industry is kinda pointless.