Today it’s been announced that Pioneer DJ’s KUVO music tagging system now plays nicely with Richie Hawtin’s RADR initiative, meaning Traktor DJs can add their plays to KUVO too. This follows on from last week’s announcement that the flagship Pioneer CDJ-2000NXS2 multi players and DJM-900NXS2 mixer finally play nicely with Traktor Pro 2, meaning easier set-changes, DVS use and HID control for Traktor users on Pioneer DJ gear.
While the second example of cross-platform collaboration just described is easy enough to understand (it just means you don’t need a separate Traktor DVS interface to use timecode with Pioneer DJ gear, and the screens and controls of the CDJ-2000NXS show stuff when used with Traktor – a return to how it was with the original NXS gear, in other words), today’s announcement may need some explanation.
Basically, Pioneer DJ has a technology called KUVO that can be installed in DJ booths and that among other things, automatically reports back what DJs are playing to the organisations who dish out royalties. Part of an initiative called “Get Played Get Paid” that is backed by the Association for Electronic Music (AFEM), KUVO should over time mean that smaller labels and producers get their share of revenue from plays of their music in public, rather than the money going by default to the very big artists, thanks to the current imperfect systems of distribution.
Today’s announcement means that Traktor DJs – who Richie Hawtin’s RADR system, which automatically tweet the tunes they’re playing in their sets, is aimed at – can now also feed that info into KUVO.
Is this the start of more consolidation?
“It’s an ecosystem. We have to take care of each other,” Richie Hawtin is quoted as saying about this latest collab. A nice sentiment, for sure. But it’s also a commercial world out there, with money to be made. Which poses some interesting questions.
For instance, back to the Traktor/Pioneer DJ NXS2 point. Pioneer says the cross-compatibility fall under something they’re calling the “Pioneer DJ Certification Program”, which they describe as “an initiative to evaluate products from other companies and certify them as compatible with our DJ gear so you know you can use them together with confidence”.
It will be interesting to see if the same thing follows for the other big platforms, Serato DJ and Virtual DJ – or at the very least, Serato DJ. If it didn’t, then it would point to the possibility that there’s a commercial reasons to the growing partnership between Pioneer DJ and Traktor – an intriguing thought indeed as the DJ industry continues to consolidate around fewer, bigger players. As ever, interesting times…
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Are you glad Pioneer DJ and Traktor are seemingly falling over themselves to play nicely together nowadays? Where do you think this is all leading? Let us know your thoughts in the comments…
Phil Morse
