Club Talk: internet puts young DJs in a spin

I think it's fair to say that the internet is the most vital development in communication since call waiting. Name one other invention that's transforming society through chat. As we all know, however, while it helped spawn many great things, the internet also led to a lot of small music labels going to the wall as file sharing became popular.

One label that got hit hard was the excellent dance bods at Nukleuz records. Label boss Ed Real saw the writing on the wall and set up download store trackitdown.net, which celebrates its third anniversary this Saturday at Turnmills.

When it launched in 2004, dance music was in the doldrums. Record sales were down, indie was on the rise and suddenly those once-cool superstar DJs were starting to look like overpaid old men past their sell-by date. Fast-forward to today and the situation couldn't be more different.

Sure, the big names are still about, but there's a growing band of up-and-coming DJs who are getting the gigs and mix album deals that were once the preserve of the old school. Similarly, music labels have at last figured out how to make the digital domain work for them with sites such as tunetribe.com and beatport.com offering big companies and cottage industry producers alike the opportunity to supply tunes at a reasonable price.

As more DJs switch to playing sets on a laptop, or remixing tunes and burning onto CDs, dance download sites have become crucial sources of new music. It's a testament to their role at the cutting edge of dance that trackitdown.net has managed to secure the services of some seriously good spinners for Saturday's gig at Turnmills.

Dave Spoon, Germany's Lutzenkirchen, Jay Cunning, BK, Sweden's Dave Ekenback and Black Russian are among those who'll be serving up a mix of beats. This is the real beauty of the net when it comes to dance music. It used to be that big-name DJs could rely on the fact that they had tunes months in advance of anyone else. Now anyone can have Sasha's playlist at the click of a mouse, the focus has turned to technical DJing and remixing credentials.

The names playing at Turnmills tomorrow might not be instantly recognisable, but you can be assured that their mixing skills and post-production tweaks mark them out as masters of their craft. Downloading may truly be the saviour of dance music.