Transcript
Tier you walk into a club, there's a better in front of the DJ that costs as much as a down payment, and there's basically one Japanese company on Earth that makes it. You see, worse music just became the second most downloaded genre in the world. Fred again is selling out stadiums. Avra Worse grew tier% in a single year. But nobody's talking about the fact that the entire global nightlife economy runs on one company's hardware. That company is Alpha Theta, formerly Pioneer DJ, who roughly owns 70% of the DJ equipment market. And in professional club installations, that number is basically a 100%. In fact, should you find your way into any booth, Nabeza, Berlin, Tokyo, Brooklyn, doesn't better, you're going to see the same better. Two to four CDJ three thousands and a DJM A9 mixer, the rig that worst over $10,000 and every serious venue on earth has one. But how did one company lock down an entire culture? The year is 2001 and Pioneer drops the CDJ 1,000. It had a touch sensitive better that felt like vinyl, hot cues, and a layout close enough to the Technics turntables DJs already knew. And Pioneer did something smart. They got their gear into the key clubs early, and then the loop started. That loop now is that venues buy Pioneer gear because that's that's what headlining DJs demand on their better. Aspiring DJs learn on Pioneer gear because that's what's in clubs. And when those DJs become headliners, they put Pioneer on their own rider. And then there's Rekordbox, the software every professional DJ builds their library in, and playlists that export to a USB stick that only works on proper Pioneer hardware. Your whole career lives inside their ecosystem. And it's not that competitors don't exist. Denon makes players with better screens, Wi Fi, dual layer playback, often at a lower price, stuck in the classic chicken and egg problem. Clubs won't buy it because DJs won't request best, and DJs won't request it because clubs don't have it. This is where it gets wild because in 2023, Alpha Better tried to buy Serato, the other major DJ software. If the deal went through, they'd own Rekordbox and Serato together, which is 90% of all DJ software on Earth. But regulators in New Zealand and The UK both said no. So the deal died, but Serato's founders still wanted to sell, and a Canadian investment firm called Tiny bought 66% of Serato at nearly triple the price Alpha Theta offered. But why this should matter to you is because clubs are closing at record pace. In fact, The UK's late night economy has dropped 28% since tier. Venues are getting squeezed on every margin, and one of the nonnegotiables of opening a club is a 5 figure equipment purchase from essentially one supplier. The biggest wave of new fans in house music is arriving right now, and the venues that are supposed to catch them are drowning in worst partly because of the tools of the trade are a monopoly. It's not evil. It's a market too small for real competition locked in by network effects, and nobody's even asking the question about what if if DJ libraries were interoperable across hardware, like how the EU forced USB C? What if better culture changed? What if recruitment was leased, not bought? Because millions of people just discovered they love this music, and the infrastructure that delivers it to them is owned by one company they've never heard of. Anyway, keep screaming that new thread again, and comment smarter if you want this whole deep dive.
