Miec

I feel a bit strange answering here, since I only have a bit more than half of your life experience but I agree with everyone else – do it! You’ll never find out if it’s the right thing for you if you don’t try. Most of the technical stuff comes with practice and the love for music is what’s important.

And I think your chances for getting gigs are not too bad. It’s all about finding the right niche. Sure, you probably won’t play in a club packed with raging teens, but that shouldn’t be your goal anyway. But if you aim for upper scale bars that host DJs, you seem like the perfect fit. Mature enough to relate to their customers, enthusiastic and with the ability to play a more sophisticated music selection. The market definitely is there and the number of DJs who fit that market is probably very limited.

And then, what could you lose? From a financial point of view, a pair of 1210s is probably worth more if you resell it in a few years and other quality DJ gear also doesn’t lose much value over time if treated nicely. DDJT is probably the wrong site to praise vinyl, but if you already have a collection it would be a shame not to use that resource.
You could lose some time, but what I read from your post, you’d be listening to music anyway, so why not mix it. And I have never heard from anyone who regretted starting to DJ. Some just quit after a few years because priorities in their lives changed but I never heard anyone complain about wasted time or money.

I hardly ever use Spotify for music I DJ with. I was a bit dissappointed with the size of their library of more obscure house music and the fact that their search function isn’t exactly good for searching remixes or labels. Might be a thing that could change via an app, but so far I prefer Beatport et al. as well as SoundCloud for music digging.

Spotify is reserved for the other half of my musical taste. Despite DJing mostly Deep House, I occasionally enjoy to listen to some Indie Rock, a bit of Reggae or a few Folk songs. And Spotify is just perfect for that. I’d say it’s for music that I don’t listen to enough to spend money on. Before Spotify, I might have downloaded some of it illegally, but I appreciate that I have a legal way to listen to this stuff now.

And of course it can be very entertaining to explore the oblivious musical taste of my facebook friends.

Does a “good mix” have to be beatmatched for you? If yes, then I would say anything with a live drummer.

Otherwise it really depends. In Hip-Hop, a simple cut can sound really good, while extensive scratching in the wrong places can destroy a mix. One is really simple to execute while the other is technically more advanced. Does that make Hip-Hop in generall harder or easier to mix?
From my own experience with deep and tech house, it’s not about beatmatching but to avoid clashing melodies via track selecton and EQing. Technically it’s easy to get a decent sounding mix when you stick to percussion-only intro/outro mixing, but it’s up to you if you define this as “well mixed”.

So, every genre has basic and advanced mixing techniques, both can sound good. However, I don’t really get the intention of the question; either you’re trying to decide which genre to play based on the difficulty of the mixing, what should never be an argument. The other option is, that this will end with people arguing that their genre is easier to mix than something someone else plays.

Short answer: No. America is not killing dance music.

In fact, I doubt that the developments in the States had much impact on the electronic music scene outside of the US. The only “evidence” in the Article, that there’s some effect is his Sander Van Doorn anecdote and I don’t see how is representative at all. Things might be different for other regions and genres, but from a house music perspective in Europe, things are not nearly as bad as they might seem… in fact there are some exciting things happening right now.

Take for Instance Resident Advisor’s Interview with Solomun about his Diynamic Residency in Ibiza. I highly recommend reading the whole interview, but here are some of the most interesting quotes:

About Ibiza:
“I was not so into the Ibiza thing, to be honest. I had only played one or two times the last three years there, and I didn’t find it so interesting. […] Last Year I was playing [at Sankeys], and it was not finished. [But] I was very impressed because I had a feeling it was the very frist club in Ibiza that I saw that was more like an underground club. It’s also, for me, a very fresh club. It [really] opens this year – not last year. So we thought this could fit together, these two new brands on the island.”
About lots of “underground” people doing things there this year:
“Yeah, the word I heard last weekend the most on Ibiza was “change”. A lot of different people asked me if I can play this year and looking around you can see that there are so many new things happening now. We are not the only ones who are doing something new here.”
About having Lucy Pearl’s 80s Track Don’t mess with my man in his Watergate Mix:
“Yeah, it’s a mainstream pop track, but I Know sometimes when you drop it in the right time in a set that people go crazy. Nowadays I have a feeling you have more space. You can feel free to do that. It’s not like before – a couple of years ago or longer – where you have to check, ‘Oh, I’m not able to play more than two tracks with vocals…’ “

Also I think that Americans have got that festival thing all wrong. At least whit Electronic Music. This might have to do something with the American “clubbing culture” (If you want to call it like that), that Richie Hawtin criticized recently. It’s not like that there aren’t any examples of EDM festivals that manage to combine Mainstream with Underground. The best example is probably Belgium’s Tomorrowland where the Big Artists play prime-time shows on the Mainstage while underground labels showcase their talent on smaller stages around that. In the best case, People new to EDM decide to visit a festival like that for the main acts and then get dragged deeper into the fascinating world that is Electronic Music. And Tomorrowland is not that special in Europe, if you check out Barcelona’s Sónar or Melt! in Germany.

Again, I don’t know how the situation is in other parts of the world, but for Europe I don’t really see a threat for dance music culture.