The abridged version: Producer > DJ. Thankfully, a producer can now DJ with a wonderful tool called Ableton Live, eliminating years of practice and expensive DJ equipment.

I always felt that in order to make it in the trance/progressive DJ world, you also have to be a producer. Especially with the rise of filesharing, music exclusivity is what makes one trance DJ, or any DJ for that matter, stand out from another. If you look at that list of top 25 DJs, they all are producers. Yet, it seems it doesn't make them any better in your critical eyes.

Off topic: I went to see DJ Z-Trip, for the first time, after reading your article on the best DJ in the world. As I knew he would, he rocked it with his wide range of tracks and technical ability. Thanks for the recommendation.

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Originally posted by Ishkur I was making a reply to the thread that System-J started, but that got locked before I finished. So I'm putting it here, which is kind of on-topic, because it kind of explains the satire behind my list as well: I'll not only self-plagiarize something, I'll self-plagiarize something I said not more than an hour ago TO YOU....but I'll dress it up a bit. *ahem* I really think that the whole reason behind why the line between DJ and Producer is so blurred in because of one thing: File-sharing. The internet is a boon to the proliferation and solidarity of sub-cultural social tribes. The furries, the geeks, the goths, the anime otakus etc....all lived huddled in relative obscurity beforehand, their scenes teetering on the edge of anonymity, each of them clustering together in the cities in small, likeminded enclaves. Without any form of mass media push to represent them, they relied on themselves to push their lifestyle, largely via word-of-mouth. Because of this, the scenes moved relatively slowly and with concerned purpose for their just existence. The internet pushed all of these undercultures into prominance. The presence of omnipotent communication accelerated many of them sociologically, and broke others into the mainstream. Such is the case with electronic music. With no real radio or television exposure, electronic music remained something secretive and separate from the music world at large. To find it, you had to know where to look. You needed to know certain people to have it, go certain places to hear it, join certain groups and record pools and mailing lists to be apart of it. If you didn't have access to any one of these things or you didn't know anyone who was, getting involved could be very problematic. For the scene wasn't interested in finding you. You had to go find it. The internet changed all that. Now it can be found with two clicks of a button and a keyword search. But what REALLY exploded the scene was file-sharing. File-sharing was not a new phenomenon. People had been trading music via private FTP servers for as long as music was capable of being transferred over the internet. But being apart of these collectives, and possessing the technical knowhow to run an FTP client pretty much made them closed-off to the general body of humanity who barely knew how to run their email until web-based email apps made them stupidly simple. Then Napster emerged. Based on the FTP model, it was the "complex technology made stupidly simple" answer that made it all possible. Suddenly, every Dick and Jane could trade music. And the great fight for the digital liberation of music was on. What resulted in this, of course, is a lowering of the bar. As what usually happens when the masses join something, the average intelligence and level of commitment goes down. Ignorance, slovenliness, and irresponsibility infected music trading channels. Added to this was the growing prominence of electronic music, but more importantly, the people playing the electronic music. Not making it. Taking a cue from the pop world, EDM marketers figured out that something could sell a hell of a lot better if a face/name/image/style was applied to it. Thus, nameless mix CDs which in the early 90s were simple throwaway titles like "Trancendental Explorations Vol. 4" used as a means to get the music into the hands of a growing number of consumers apprehensive about getting the music on vinyl were transformed into ALBUMS...featuring someone IMPORTANT. It wasn't just "Tranceport". It was "PAUL OAKENFOLD: Tranceport". The peons, gravitating from the pop world model of album-oriented marketing, took that cue to mean that he was the brains behind the outfit, and before long every song on Tranceport was on Napster, erronously named as a Paul Oakenfold track, from his original artist CD Tranceport. The result: Oakenfold's infamy was hyper-inflated to ridiculous proportions, and he became the first trance superstar. To this day, I still get angry emails from kids who tell me that Gamemaster is by Oakenfold, and Binary Finary is by Paul van Dyk. And that continues to this day. Every mis-labelled track you find on a file-sharer means there is someone out there misplacing an awful lot of devotion and worship. Because the DJs are marketed more than the Producers, they get all the press, all the accolades, all the attention, and all the fun. With so much overwhelming pressure to worship the man behind the decks and not the guy sitting in the studio, people can't help but believe there's a method to all the madness. In all honesty, people, worshipping the DJs is like giving the guy channel-surfing on his TV unending adulation for the original premise of Lost. If you think your favourite DJ's placement on some sort of list validates your opinion of him tenfold, then you probably don't get it, and after eight years of this shit, most of us are fucking sick of trying to explain it to you.