After years of speculation, Final Scratch has debuted the first comprehensive system to play digital music files on turntables. Originally conceived to keep the “cool skill factor” of DJing vinyl records, while liberating the DJ of transporting his record box from gig to gig, the system is comprised of two “records” that have Time Code recorded into the grooves instead of audio, a computer interface called the ScratchAmp and the Final Scratch software. At first look, this system appears to be the “Final Solution.” A bridge between the analog world of vinyl records and the digital world of MP3. However, upon further inspection and reflection, this could yield a severe blow to the dance music industry. By removing the foundation of dance music dissemination, Final Scratch could systematically destroy the main revenue stream of hundreds of independent dance music labels. Instead of buying vinyl, DJ’s will scour the file trading entities for the latest tracks and download these songs without providing payment to the labels or artists. DJ’s can unquestionably turn vinyl records into CD-R’s but this is not nearly as easy as downloading a track from LimeWire or the like, and simply accessing it via Final Scratch’s software. Convenience and ease, the K-Y Jelly of the online world, is what will make pirating MP3’s for Final Scratch the norm.This is quite a conundrum. On the one hand, technology fuels electronic music. But now the industry is faced with a new technology that threatens to wipe out the life blood of its existence. The bomb bay doors of the Enola Gay have opened my friends, welcome to dance music’s atomic age.

So the question is how responsible is the DJ public going to be? Should DJ’s refuse outright to purchase Final Scratch and similar products such as Sound Graph’s D-Vinyl 2020 from Seoul, Korea, and continue to purchase vinyl? I can certainly see DJ veterans taking this path, but early technology adopters and kids just getting into DJing will definitely go for the Final Scratch option for several reasons. First off, newbies can acquire an enormous collection of current and classic tracks for free, whereas long time DJ’s have been required to painstakingly go record shopping on a regular basis for years to accumulate their collection. Second, Final Scratch is very attractively priced at about $500 dollars (approximately 60 records), a quintessential debut price point. Third, the Final Scratch technology develops mixing technique. Unlike some CD DJ systems that automatically beat match two songs for mixing, Final Scratch still requires the DJ to use pitch control and their ears to mix. Pretty compelling arguments in Final Scratch’s favor except for one big fuck up. Final Scratch’s developers made the incredibly idiotic mistake of developing Final Scratch’s computer software for the now defunct BeOS. A fringe operating system that never gained any traction. Now that Be is history, Final Scratch’s developers are scrambling to port the software to another poor choice, Linux. It’s not that Linux is going to embark on the slow belabored death that finally put the BeOS out of its misery, it’s that the DJ consumer cannot run the software on his Microsoft Windows based laptop.

Well, that gives us some time to reflect on this technology and formulate a strategy. What will Final Scratch do when someone brings up the argument that their technology will hurt our industry? Well, they won’t “do” anything, but they’ll probably say something like this (pull the string on the back of the doll): “Our technology gives the music consumer the ability to take digital copies of their legally purchased music and mix them with Final Scratch for personal use” or “Final Scratch simply enables the DJ to mix digital music files, we are not responsible for how the consumer acquires the music” or “Final Scratch is in the business of creating technology for mixing music, not policing our consumers” and so forth. Sounds familiar, right? We’ve heard all these rebuttals before, mostly from file trading enablers such as Napster, and many of us, including myself, have readily agreed so that we could continue to download music for free. So let’s just say file trading is here to stay and there’s no way to stop the Final Scratch type of DJ technology from continuing to develop. So what’s the plan?

Ask your local nightclubs and lounges to not install this technology, even if it is given to them for free. If a club doesn’t install the Final Scratch technology, then DJ’s will be required to bring records to their gigs and the vinyl format will continue to provide revenue for independent labels. Club owners have an obligation to the dance music industry not to install this technology into their PA systems, since they rely on the labels to provide the music to feed their hungry sound systems. Without dance labels, there would be no clubs. If DJ’s want to bring their own systems into a club and plug-in, then fine, no one should stop Mr. Hawtin, but just don’t install the Scratch Amp interface.

We can still listen to the vinyl records our parents bought in the 50’s and 60’s. But the CDs we bought during the 80’s are starting to self-destruct right now. That’s because a printed CD has a life span of approximately 15 years. After that time the CD has lost its transparency due to oxidisation and can not be read by the laser in the CD players any more. Therefore the owners of CDs need to make backup copies of the CDs they have bought. Also they need to later on make backups of the backups they have made since “home burnt” CD-Rs only have a life span of 5-10 years. (CD-Rs with the recording surface made of gold is said to have the longest life span and silver is said to have the second longest life span.)Since the record industry now have started to use copy protection on the CDs they are selling they have effectively changed the “licence” for the music buyer from “buy once, listen your entire life” to “buy your entire record collection again every 15 years". But there is no mentioning of this “limited listening time licence” on the copy protected CDs being sold today and the record industry has made no effort whatsoever to inform about the self-destruct “feature” of CDs. In many countries that would make selling of copy protected CDs illegal! That is, to sell a product that has totally different properties than the majority of the customers expect without informing the customers is fraud.

…/David