By Kate Harper
If you’ve ever sat at your computer, music blaring through headphones clasped firmly to your ears, nerdishly making a mix CD and thought, “It would be so cool to be a DJ,” your time may have come… but only if you own an iPod.
iPod battles are the latest craze to hit the hipster scene, devoted to indie music and all things alternative and kitschy.
Organized by local DJs or concert promoters, the events take over nightclubs and bars for an evening.
Several teams of two to three people face off onstage, armed with iPods full of random tunes from all genres.
In 15 minute sets they take turns playing about a minute from a song on their play list. At the end of each round, the crowd screams for each team.
A decibel metre is used to measure the noise levels and the team which gets the loudest response wins the round and advances to the next. Whoever wins all the rounds is crowned iPod battle champion.
Pioneered in Paris in early 2006, iPod battles have recently made the jump across the Atlantic and are now invading Canadian cities. Montreal has held several battles since October 2006, Toronto held its first at the end of the same year, and two weeks ago, Ottawa held its second battle.
In general, the more ridiculous your music, the more likely you are to win an iPod battle.
Teams that won rounds at Ottawa’s last battle played songs by Twisted Sister, Ciara, and Christina Aguilera to a crowd of hipsters that would probably never be caught dead listening to such songs.
With such over-the-top theatrics, it’s hard to believe they’re anything more than a hipster fad. But what’s hard to deny is they represent further evidence of how the iPod is changing music.
Consumers are opting for the convenience of 5,000 songs at their fingertips and podcasts from the Internet in lieu of the Sony Discman and the radio.
It remains to be seen whether they’ll opt for an iPod-carrying hipster instead of a DJ spinning beats when out at a club. But the fact that iPods are even playing music in clubs represents a shift in the music consumer’s mindset.
Since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has begun to revolutionize music consumption. The iPod is the “must have” status symbol of this decade. Twenty-two million Americans now own iPods. That’s 22 million potential DJs!
With this in mind, the battles are a bit of an inadvertent marketing tactic, likely to further boost Apple’s already chic image. With the ubiquity of the iPod in popular culture, whether Apple even needs the boost is questionable.
But at least for now, iPods aren’t replacing turntables. Mash-ups, the popular DJ practice of mixing two songs together to combine their beats, rhythms, or other music components, are strictly forbidden in iPod battles. The wannabe spinsters on stage cranking tunes from their palm-sized music devices aren’t real DJs just yet.
Nevertheless, the message is simple: You can be a DJ, too!
…as long as you own an iPod.