The all-vinyl set is back — and harder than ever
A new generation of DJs is choosing the crate over the USB stick. The reasons are better than nostalgia.
Watch the booth at any serious club night this year and you'll notice the laptops thinning out. Not gone — nobody sensible is calling time on CDJs — but there is a visible cohort of DJs under 30 hauling record bags again, and they are not doing it for the aesthetic. Or not only.
Ask them and you get practical answers. A crate of 60 records forces decisions a folder of 6,000 files never will. Beatmatching by ear changes how you listen to the room. And in a booking market flooded with technically identical sets, "plays vinyl only" is a differentiator promoters can sell.
“A crate of 60 records forces decisions a folder of 6,000 files never will.”
There's an economic story underneath. Second-hand dance 12"s remain one of the cheapest ways to build a distinctive catalogue — a €3 bin record nobody has Shazamed is worth more in a set than a €1.29 file everyone owns. The DJs doing this well treat digging as A&R, not shopping.
The hard part is everything around the music: flight cases, needle skips on bass-heavy systems, monitors that were EQ'd for CDJs sometime in 2019. We spoke to eight DJs playing all-vinyl sets about how they actually make it work — and when they don't.
Their consensus, roughly: the format is a constraint you choose because of what it does to your selection, and the moment it becomes a purity test it stops being useful. The best line came from a selector in Glasgow: "The crowd can't see what's in the bag. They can only hear whether you meant it."