I echo what Travis said. In any business you must constantly adapt to innovation and new technology. DJing and sound reproduction seem to be in pop technologies crosshairs right now, if you don't adapt you're going to be left behind, just like in any other business.
Content mediums have drastically changed since I was born (1984). Do you see anyone play cassette tapes these days? When our parents talk about phonographs we think "How lame" (well non-djs would). When we have children and they grow up, CDs are going to be lame. To our grandkids iPods are going to be lame.
Newspapers are a dying breed, major publishers are loosing millions because us younger guys would rather jump online to read the lastest news. What are they doing? Some are selling online subscriptions at a reduced rate vs. the paper version. Is it working? Nope, look at all the advertisments plastered all over any newspapers website.
Same with television, for our generation and perhaps moreso the generation after us the internet is our communication/news/entertainment portal. Television stations are constantly trying to tie in with pop culture, most of the reality shows have text message voting in addition to voting online to attract more viewers, of course TV stations website are plastered with advertiments just like TV.
15 years from now the media as we know it is going to be completely different, I believe cable, telephone and possibly electric companies will be merely bandwidth portals to transfer data into our homes with content being provided by sources removed from the cable operator. There is already technology out there called ipTV, high qualilty a/v media over the internet. It's going to take big leaps to get TV quality media over the US current internet infastucture. The big ISPs dropped the ball and wasted hundreds of
millions on roll out. We were supposed to super high speed asnycronus connections by 2000. But that's probably a little to high on the geek meter for you guys though.
Look at companies like Vontage, using the internet for telephone calls. If we can get crystal clear voice over the internet, video isn't far behind. The big telcos dropped the ball and didn't see it Vonage coming, they've price gouged for all these years and now they're doing everything they can to prevent Vonage and similar companies from rolling out service.
--Wow I ventured WAY of topic but the whole idea basically is:
You as a business owner constantly have to be on top of what's going on and change your business model and plans based on what happening in the world.
As for being your own DJ.. Of all the things a computer can do, it cannot read a crowds reaction, body language excetera. That's what a real DJ does, any idiot can press play and fade the mixer over.
