Twenty years ago, practically all DJs were spinning vinyl. Boy how that’s fragmented! Find out the gear, music, software, venues, and more of our readership in today’s survey results…
Want to know where you fit in among the overall readership of Digital DJ Tips? A few weeks ago we conducted our biggest-ever reader survey in conjunction with Native Instruments, who offered Traktor hardware and software as prizes. Nearly 5,000 of you took part in the survey, and today we have the results for you.
You probably won’t be surprised that 97% of you are male, but you may be surprised that the biggest single age group among our readers is 30-39 year olds. The full results appear below.
Reader survey 2012
Nearly half of our readers are in the United States and Canada, both due to the huge population of North America combined and – of course – to the recent explosion in electronic dance music (or “EDM”) in the US. By continent, though, there are about as many readers in Europe (of which the UK is our largest market, and of course which is no stranger to dance explosions itself) as in the Americas as a whole. Relatively smaller proportions of our readers are from Asia, Australasia and Africa, in that order.
It may surprise you to see all age groups represented on Digital DJ Tips, but not us – we’ve long known that as well as new DJs, starting out on digital, we have a huge audience returning to the craft as digital DJs many years after hanging up their headphones as vinyl guys. There are also plenty of DJs making the switch at all other age points.
Most of you class yourselves as beginner to intermediate DJs – no surprise really as our How To Digital DJ Fast beginner DJ course attracts a lot of traffic to this site. But we do have our fair share of advanced and expert jocks among us. It’s one reason why I think we’re so strong in teaching new DJs – there’s lots of talent on tap to chip in and help out!
Reflecting people’s skill levels, we’ve got DJs just starting out, DJs who’ve been doing it for decades, and everyone in-between! Again, the breadth of time behind the decks among our readers is something we really enjoy, as having such wide input enrichens the debate and makes our content ultimately more useful to all DJs, whatever their age.
Most of you DJ as a hobby, but a significant proportion of you are semi-pro DJs, with a reasonable number of pros among our reach too. I expect that “pro” category will creep up over the coming years, as many of our committed amateurs start setting up as pro DJs… then again, our readership is growing awfully fast, and I suspect most of the new readers are just starting out, so who knows?
It’s great when you’re in a big gang of music loving DJs, but that’s not always the case, and often DJs find themselves with only one or two other friends or mentors who are interested in what they do for a hobby or living. It’s when the answer is “none”, though, that we feel our forum, comments, Facebook page and training can really help to connect people who otherwise might have nobody they regular talk about their DJing to.
We wanted to know this to gauge the importance of our mobile site, as well as to find out how many of you potentially have a device you can DJ on that isn’t your laptop. The answers here confirmed our suspicion that we’ve got an awful lot of mobile device users, and that you’re very Apple-centric. Which leads us on to the next question:
Most of our iPad owning DJs are either already using a DJ app on their devices, or at least open to the idea. Of those who gave an absolute “no”, we think as hardware becomes more compatible with iPad DJ apps, that already relatively small number will drop further.
No surprises that Beatport comes out on top here, but it’s also clear that people have almost as wide a choice of preferred stores as type of DJ out there. I’d take some of the numbers with a pinch of salt though, purely because a lot of people don’t admit to piracy; I suspect that the percentage that thinks it’s OK to steal music is higher than the filesharing segment indicates, if the feeling I get from my day-to-day private interaction with DJs is anything to go by.
It’s one of the big skills of DJing nowadays, production – or rather, “production lite” (remixing, mashups, re-edits etc). It’s therefore no surprise that we’ve got an aspirational readership in this area – bluntly, to get on nowadays, you have to produce.
No surprise to see Ableton Live as the top choice for DJ/producers, as its clip-based workflow suits dance music fantastically, and it blurs the line between production and performance nicely too. FL Studio (formerly FruityLoops) remains a massively popular package, and rightfully so, as it often doesn’t get the props it deserves – many global hits have been made with this software.
Wow! Samples, effects, hot cues, sampling, remixing – there’s nothing you lot won’t have a go at to get ahead. any why not? The power of modern digital DJing software and the flexibility of the hardware means that whatever’s in your head is more than ever something you can at least have a go at getting onto the dancefloor. The days of simple beatmixing all night long do clearly seem to be something we’re moving rapidly away from as digital matures…
Next page of Digital DJ Tips 2012 Reader Survey Results »
Pages: 1 2
Tags: reader survey 2012
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Why are Canada and the USA combined?
[ link ]Good question, as the survey was managed by a third party, we had no control over that geo-targeting decision.
[ link ]You might be surprised how much readership you have in Toronto.
[ link ]No offence intended to our Canadian readers – you’ll note we’re Canadian English, not US English
As I say, this one was out of our control. You may be interested to know our US/Canadian split is 85% / 15%, meaning about 30,000 Canadian readers a month. So yes you’re right, plenty of Canadian readers. Thanks!
[ link ]Where the winners announced?
[ link ]They were announced ages ago!
[ link ]Why did you use pie charts for all anwsers ?
[ link ]for multi-answer questions this gives absolutely no information.
you should have bar charts for these
Agreed, we could have spent a bit more time presenting the info. I think it’s still useful though. It was quite an overwhelming post to produce.
[ link ]Is it possible to add the percentages to the groups?
Some might have difficulties combining the colors with the groupnames.
[ link ]Would love to break it all down further – no time this time, but we’ll keep your idea in mind for next time. Always looking to improve!
[ link ]Was Propellerheads Reason really not an option for producing music? Thats insane.
[ link ]I agree, I use Propellerheads Reason 6, its amazing! I too feel it should have made the list, especially over Garage band which is less geared for remixing, which is more DJ oriented production work. Garage band is more band based and rather basic and beginner software.
[ link ]i participated with no expectation of winning anything, but lucked into a copy of traktor pro 2.5. many thanks to both ddjt and ni.
[ link ]I am guessing that most, if not all, DJs get *some* music from illegitimate means, but I do think that the number of people that never buys any music is rather low indeed.
Me, if I *really* like a track, I will buy it. And I will not feel cheated if I get the exact same file as I already had. On the contrary: I already know the quality is good.
[ link ]i would like to see how some of the data is interrelated
like
“those who live from DJing, what Software do they use”
“those who own four deck controllers, what is the genre they play”
“those that use DVS, which one?”
“those that use controllers, which software?”
“those who DJ weddings, what genre do they play”
results by region, e.g US & Canada // Europe etc.
(just examples, but things like that, especially when the results are significantly different than the published ones.
[ link ]Yup, we published because we thought people would have a fleeting interest, didn’t realise we’d have so many readers so vociferous for the information! We’ll take your points on board for next time.
[ link ]Maybe you could share the (anonymized) raw data for some data mining? Or is it too much to ask?
[ link ]Too much to ask, sorry!
[ link ]I feel you guys are being a bit over critical, the info is there, great one as always!
[ link ]I second that. Quit being picky.
[ link ]+1
[ link ]The ‘portable devices’ chart is tricky… what about people who own both an ipad, an iphone and other devices… the chart will add up to more than 100%
[ link ]…Though… this is a great resource.. thanks so much for posting this info!! It really puts the market into perspective.
[ link ]That’s true there are some flaws but hopefully it still gives a good picture.
[ link ]It does! People just likes to complain about things. By the way, Didn’t expect the majority of readers to be 30-39, that’s incredible.
[ link ]We have a lot of readers who have DJed previously, maybe had a short break, then got back into it BECAUSE of digital…
[ link ]