Are DJs Musicians or Not?

Musicians

Are DJs actually musicians or do they just play music to masses? This is a question that has caused a lot of debate in the music industry, as DJs have slowly started taking over the world. This is a troublesome question since being a DJ involves a certain set of skills: you need to be able to blend your music the right way, choose the right snips, understand your audience, and so on. However, can a DJ be considered a musician because of that? For example, you need plenty of skills to change a flat tire on your car, but does that make you a mechanic?

At the same time, sculptors and painters are viewed as artists because they master a skill that allows them to get a positive reaction from their audience. If you think about it, that is the same thing a DJ does — they master skills that cause a set of emotions to appear in their audience.

How Important Selecting the Right Tunes Is?

To put it simply, the job of a DJ is to select a number of tunes and play them to a crowd of people in order to get them to dance. Now, you can say that an iPod could do the same thing if you choose the right tracks and put them in the correct order. We wouldn’t say an iPod is a musician, so what is the thing that makes a DJ one of them?

The point of the story is that you need to select the right song and play it at the right time in order to make people dance and keep the spirits up. That involves getting and processing a lot of cues from your audience and make the right judgment in a matter of seconds.

Another goal that DJs try to meet is not to allow the audience to realize when the song has changed and to eliminate any dead air between tunes. The party must always go on. You couldn’t get this results by loading a playlist from YouTube, which is why a DJ could definitely be considered an artist and a musician.

The Art of Mixing and Remixing

Contrary to popular belief, a DJ does not just play pre-recorded music — they also create music from scratch. A DJ will use his set of skills to create a unique melody and build a brand new song around it. If that does not make them a musician, we don’t know what else would do.

Moreover, DJs often create remixes by taking original songs from other artists and modifying them slightly in order to make them better, easier to dance to and give them more character. We’d all agree that more often than not, remixes end up being better than the original songs.

However, some schooled musicians claim that DJs do not have the necessary theoretical knowledge and the only thing they do is experiment until they are happy with the results. Moreover, they claim that the only difference between a good and a bad DJ is how good and how persistent they are with experimenting.

Conclusion

We firmly believe that DJs can and should be considered musicians due to all the reasons we have mentioned. Even though some of them should not be allowed to make music at all, others are definitely able to produce masterpieces. Let us know what you think!