Over To You: What Music Formats Will Dominate DJing Next?

Digital DJ Tips reader Darren writes: “We’ve gone through many audio formats – eight-track, vinyl, tape, CDs and now of course digital. We’re all using MP3s, AACs, FLACs and WAV files to DJ with now – but what do you think the next dominant format will be?”

Digital DJ Tips says:

It’s an interesting question. Putting aside the few who say we should all go back to vinyl, I think we’re all agreed we are stuck with digital. And despite what purists say about sound quality, the MP3 is engrained because the vast majority of people (including DJs) are perfectly happy with the sound quality from good MP3s (and from Apple’s iTunes AAC equivalent), and the advantages of compression make them easy to store and stream, even on cheap devices and across slow networks, like 3G.

That said, inevitably storage will get cheaper and cheaper, bandwidth wider and wider, and at some point, it’ll be just as convenient to use lossless audio format as “lossy” MP3/AAC formats are now. Question is, will the dominance of MP3s continue even when that happens, or will so-called hi-res formats begin to make inroads for DJs and consumers? Or is something else entirely just around the corner?

I’m going to throw this one over to our readers, as I’m sure there will be lots of interesting opinions and insights out there to be shared, and my crystal ball is overworked with all the Pioneer gossip this week!

So, over to you. In ten years, will we all be streaming and DJing with 320kbps MP3s, or will there be another big shift in music files and/or formats to something new? Love to hear your thoughts in the comments…