How DJ streams changed everything

Back in 2010, an age when smartphones were still a fancy indulgence, YouTube only allowed ten-minute clips, and podcasting was just beginning to flourish, Pioneer DJ semi-accidentally caught the beginning of a wave, one that was about to engulf DJ culture. 

“We filmed a radio show,” said Dan Tait from AlphaTheta / Pioneer DJ. “The show was on Ibiza Sonica Radio. Filming DJs playing in a studio just wasn’t a thing, many were bemused as to why we would want to film someone playing other people’s music, so we said, ‘Come on the radio, promote your night on the island… Oh, and by the way, there will be cameras.’” The stream was called the DJsounds Show, and it ran from 2010 to 2020, filming from locations around Ibiza, Berlin, Paris, and a studio in London.

As we know now, DJ streams would soon become massive. Boiler Room led the charge. Beatport Live, DJ Mag and Mixmag got in on the fun, shooting streams in their offices and at live events. And with channels like HÖR, Cercle, and My Analog Journal, by the end of the decade a new school had arrived.  

The DJsounds Show stopped programming when COVID hit in 2020. “We didn’t want to compete with charitable streams, with artist streams,” said Tait. “So we figured we’d take a break.” Now, as the show relaunches, the DJsounds Show enters into a pretty different landscape. 

“The streaming world has really matured over the last 15 years,” Tait said. “We want our new show to reflect that.” 

“Matured” may be putting it lightly. From 2010 to 2020, evolutions in technology and culture made DJ streams a cornerstone of dance music. When the pandemic hit in 2020, they became even more important. In the absence of IRL events, streams were an essential point of contact between DJs and their fans. 

Back in the early 2010s, even the big streams had a scrappy DIY charm, typically showing live footage of a private party from a single, unchanging angle. Today, they tend to be high-production and high-stakes. Dozens of people can work on each video, filming from multiple angles, and doing post-production work to get the sound and visuals just right. 

The videos are even promoted the way you would a record—or, perhaps more fittingly, a mix CD, that once-essential format that’s more or less been reincarnated as the DJ stream. Almost all DJ streams are recorded, then edited and published at a later date. In other words, they are, for the most part, no longer live streams. 

What they are is a professionally produced digital asset with a broad reach and a long shelf-life, potentially racking up millions of views over years, and occasionally launching the career of a DJ in one fell swoop. Even without that kind of stellar result, they can be incredibly valuable to electronic performers, easily trumping records when it comes to showing off what they do best. 

Artists plan their sets for months. They treat them more like a recorded studio mix than a live stream. In turn, Boiler Room treats the stream as an official release, complete with a marketing campaign and a carefully planned roll-out. The end result can be incredibly beneficial, both to Boiler Room and the DJ playing. Both parties have learned to treat it that way.

To appreciate how big of a change that is, it’s worth going back to Boiler Room’s beginnings. In 2010, its founder, Blaise Belleville, asked Femi Adeyemi, the founder of NTS Radio, and Thristian Richards, DJ and radio host better known as Thris Tian, to record a mix for him. They duct-taped a webcam to the wall of an old—you guessed it—boiler room, and broadcast the mix on Ustream.tv. Over the next year, a basic concept took shape: camera facing the DJ, Boiler Room logo on the wall in the background. Eventually, people were invited down to the parties to dance behind the DJ. The platform quickly grew. 

“From a small room in Dalston to a globe-spanning brand, in just over a year Boiler Room has emerged as one of the most important broadcasters in underground music,” Dummy magazine wrote in 2011. Bookings became increasingly broad and ambitious, ranging from house music legends like Theo Parrish to, before that year was up, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Over time, Boiler Room’s operation expanded to hosting stages at festivals (streamed, of course) to promoting their own events, not all of them streamed. Today, they work to shine light on scenes and cities around the world.

Long before that advanced stage of evolution, though, the original concept of a video-streamed DJ set proved to have fairly obvious value to everyone involved—streamer, audience, and DJ. 

“You can reach audiences all around the globe with streams,” said Euan McGraw, former Head of Broadcasting at DJ Mag. “In a club or festival, you are playing for the people in the room. Now there’s a chance you can go viral from doing a live stream, which can skyrocket your DJ bookings. As a viewer, there is also a try-before-you-buy aspect. If a friend mentions a DJ that perhaps you’ve not heard of, one of the first things you tend to do is search for one of their sets. There’s also a lot you can learn as a viewer from DJs when watching a stream: seeing how a DJ mixes, uses Hot Cues, or any other tricks they have can help someone learning.”

DJ Mag wasn’t the only dance music institution to throw their hat in the ring. Mixmag TV and Beatport Live both began streaming parties, in their offices and at live events. Video streams of full-length DJ sets quickly became an essential form of media in club music, finding a place alongside podcasts and print—and, more and more, outperforming them in terms of engagement.

Meanwhile, a new wave of DJ streams was about to materialize, offering different takes on what was by now an established format. One was HÖR BERLIN, an outfit that broadcasts from a refurbished public toilet in the Kreuzberg district. HÖR runs like a radio station, with live, rolling broadcasts, one after another, throughout the day and night. As with the early Boiler Room sessions, you see one unchanging shot facing the DJ. Instead of a dancing crowd, though, you get the club-tested backdrop of colored light on white tile. 

“We wanted to create a space that felt raw and accessible—a reflection of what we loved in music and Berlin’s underground,” said Charly, a DJ and producer from Tel Aviv who founded HÖR with Ori Itshaky. “It was about finding a way to share music in a way that felt real and direct. It was about creating something raw, not overproduced, and letting the format evolve with us.”

HÖR quickly became a staple of Berlin’s club community, giving shows to totally unknown DJs (the author of this piece included) as well as big names like Ellen Allien and Rebekah. Shows were aired live on HÖR BERLIN’s homepage and archived on YouTube, with view counts ranging from a few thousand to a few million. 

“Streaming bridges gaps,” Charly said. “Artists can experiment more than in a club setting, where there’s pressure to deliver to the crowd. For viewers, it’s a window into the artist’s world, with the added bonus of intimacy. Unlike a podcast, which is all about sound, or a club, where the visuals are background, a stream gives you the full picture: sound, mood, and space.”

Another new kid on the block was Cercle, a French streaming channel founded by Derek Barbolla in 2016. Cercle offered something quite different to its predecessors. Rather than putting DJs in an intimate space or capturing them onstage, it placed them in a surreal scenario of its own creation: playing, sometimes alone, in some of the most visually stunning locations in the world. Think the Great Pyramids of Giza, the ancient city of Petra, and—why not—a hot-air balloon drifting over Cappadocia, Turkey.

“Cercle is the natural expression of my three biggest passions: music, cinema, and travel,” Barbolla said. “From the start, it was all about pushing boundaries, blending music, cinema, and travel to create something unique. The idea was to create a unique format where music meets breathtaking landscapes, turning each performance into an immersive visual and sonic experience.”

Cercle’s shoots are labor-intensive, usually involving a core team of 10 to 20 people, four to eight cameras, and up to four drones. “Post-production takes about a month,” Barbolla said. “It’s almost like editing a feature film, as we refine every detail to make it as captivating as possible.” 

In some locations, just getting the proper permits to film takes years. Cercle’s bookings lean toward big-ticket techno and tech house, from Amelie Lens to Carl Cox to Mind Against, as well talent from farther afield, like South Africa’s Shimza. The result is undoubtedly unique, creating a spectacle and a situation that would never have happened otherwise. “When there’s no audience on-site,” Barbolla said, “it often feels like the artist is playing just for you, creating a connection for the online viewer.”

One of the other recent-ish success stories in DJ streams goes for a similar feeling but in a very different way. My Analog Journal, or MAJ, launched in 2017, founded by the Istanbul-born, London-based DJ and filmmaker Zag Erlat. It began as a way for Erlat, a vinyl digger with monk-like dedication, to show off his finds, especially psychedelic Turkish records from the ’60s and ’70s, a world of music he found criminally overlooked and difficult to penetrate. Uploading videos of himself playing these records to YouTube seemed like the simplest way to share this music. 

Soon, the programming spanned a panorama of other niche genres, played by him and a cast of fellow diggers. Popular episodes—which is to say, those with north of a million views—include Colombian Salsa with Gia Fu, Afro Cuban Funky Grooves with Cami Layé Okún, and Percussive Dub, Spiritual Jazz & Psychedelic Grooves with Millie McKee. 

MAJ’s visual aesthetic is as distinctive as its music. The videos are shot in a room with inspired décor—Turkish rugs, ample plants, the odd Gibson guitar leaning against a corner. Each video has a carefully honed retro feel. “The corners are a bit curvy, almost like the film look of 16mm,” Erlat said. “There’s a lot of film grain on every episode. So there are certain aspects that work toward a nostalgia element, while giving something high-quality.”

Perhaps the most important visual element, though, is the focus on the records, the turntables, and the mixer. When MAJ began filming from multiple angles, the essential one was a bird’s-eye view of the booth, typically showing two turntables, a handsome analog rotary mixer, and whatever record sleeve the DJ chooses to hold up for the camera. 

“That’s been one of the biggest, most important things since we started,” Erlat said. “I really, really hated to look at the DJ the whole time. I was more into the records, the covers of the records, maybe seeing the mixer. If I’m a DJ I like to see how they interact with the gear. So that gave me the idea to use the bird-eye view more.”

MAJ has a key influence that some may find surprising: the YouTube channel Lofi Girl, known to many as “lofi hip hop radio beats to relax/study to.” Erlat admired the sense of peace and coziness Lofi Girl created. “This animation girl studies, the cat occasionally wags its tail, that was a big inspiration,” he said. “Not that much is happening. It’s warm, it’s comforting, you can do something else, work, do the dishes, or you can watch it.” 

That feeling became all the more valuable in 2020 when, from one week to the next, most of us found ourselves spending an unprecedented amount of time stuck at home due to COVID. With real-world dance floor experiences out of the picture, DJ streams quickly emerged as the best available stand-in. 

“It was such a steep peak when it happened,” Erlat said. “YouTube became more high-production. Before people were watching on their phones. Now it’s on their Smart TVs, like they’re watching Netflix. The pandemic didn’t start that but it really pushed it.”

David Brown of Beatport Live had a similar experience. “COVID ended up being one of the most intense working periods of my life,” he said. “We did a lot of crazy things with servers, software, video and audio transport, graphics, overlays, giveaways. I’ll never forget it. In parallel, developers stuck at home were working on more robust, faster A/V protocols (e.g. SRT, webRTC). The back-end of the infrastructure for live-streaming exploded during that period.”

Audiences, meanwhile, found more value in DJ streams than ever before. In Berlin, HÖR was like a tiny ember of club culture that refused to be stamped out, its glowing studio visible from the street, with DJs smoking cigarettes before or after their sets on the sidewalk outside. Cercle’s sweeping panoramas were a salve for the claustrophobia of lockdown. MAJ’s videos became a hearth, filling people’s homes with soothing sounds and cozy visuals. Meanwhile, other institutions and individual DJs turned to streaming as a way to stay in touch with their audience or raise money. Across the board, the format inched closer to the center of DJ culture.

In 2025, with the relaunch of the DJsounds Show, AlphaTheta returns to a party very different from the one it left five years ago. Its vision for itself has evolved accordingly. More than any particular sound, visual aesthetic or general vibe, the DJsounds Show will be all about the DJ technique, showing viewers exactly what the artists are doing behind the decks. “Boiler Room and Mixmag cut between different shots and angles,” Tait said. “It’s beautiful, and from a cinematic perspective super-vibey. But we’re taking a different perspective—literally.” 

The DJsounds Show will always provide a consistent top-down view of the decks, so the audience can see exactly how the artist actually plays. Call it a modern throwback to Jeff Mills’ Purpose Maker films, or a response to that meme of a woman tearfully demanding to know what DJs even do. Tait describes it as “a love letter to the craft.” 

“Every scene has its own characteristics,” he said. “Prog has these long intros and blends. With UKG, you need to make the intros 20 seconds or 30 seconds long because they’ll all be rewound. Some love the Slip Mode because it’s close to the glitchy, electroclash, beat-repeat stuff of the mid-2000s. Some people need the crossover of the rotary to be super smooth because they’re mixing in a super audiofile kind of way. The DJsounds show is a way of showcasing each one of those styles, saying, ‘Here’s someone at the forefront of their genre or sound.’”

Future manifestations of the DJ stream are hard to predict. “There is still a huge sandbox and tools to play with,” Brown said. “AI, LiDAR 3D, higher capacity, and more widely available internet in remote locations. I think we’ll see more formats that make sense and resonate.” Cercle are getting ready to roll out a VR experience called Odyssey; whether that’s a harbinger of things to come is anyone’s guess. 

But you don’t have to read the tea leaves too closely to see that all of this is set to keep going strong, galloping into the future in one form or another. Thanks to social media, audiovisual content is now the norm, if not the baseline expectation—even chat podcasts are filmed and formatted for YouTube, TikTok and Instagram reels. For many fans, streams are a more essential point of contact with DJs than any other format, including their records or their real-world performances. Even 15 years since the birth of the video stream, one senses that what we’ve seen so far is just the first chapter in what may become DJ culture’s most essential medium.

Text: Will Lynch

Photo header: Maxime Chermat