Get your free download: The Digital DJ Gear Buyer’s Guide
Updating this guide for 2025 was a trifle complex. You see, this is how we started the 2024 guide: “When you think streaming, you think Spotify. When you think cameras, you think Canon. When you think multi-room audio, you think Sonos. And so it is with Pioneer DJ and, well, DJing. There are other great brands, but Pioneer is the undisputed industry leader, with 70% of the market.”
So what’s changed? Well, not the market share – they’re still way out front. As you may have guessed from the headline, it’s something more fundamental – the company’s name! You see, Pioneer DJ is no more, or rather, it’s not called that nowadays – they’ve rebranded as “AlphaTheta”.
Even that is not clear-cut, though, with the company giving mixed messages about the whole thing as its older Pioneer DJ products continue to be sold – but it’s obvious that going forward, AlphaTheta is the name they’ll be using and the one we need to get used to, even if the brand is staying coy today about this switch.
However, it’s the same gear, same team, same technology, so for this year’s version of our guide, we’ll call the company by either or both names as makes sense.
So… Pioneer DJ/AlphaTheta’s ascendence began with it establishing its CDJs in pro DJ booths, just as DJs were moving away from vinyl. Nowadays, the standard pro DJ booth gear set-up is two (or four) of their CDJ players and – usually – an accompanying DJM-900NXS2 or DJM-A9 DJ mixer, too.
When it came to DJ controllers, Pioneer DJ was actually late to the game, releasing controllers for Traktor (the DDJ-T1) and Serato (the DDJ-S1) before it even had its own Rekordbox DJ software. But it soon caught up and now dominates that market too, with a whole range of products, as we’ll see.