1950-2000 Academics are intrigued by the fact that the DJ makes a living by filtering information; he makes sense of the confusing mass of musical information that bombards us (there are well over 200 dance singles released each week). There's no way that we could find all the great music within our favorite genre, so we rely on DJs to do it for us. They are like personal shoppers who sift through the hundreds of crap records and find the ones we like.

These days, fewer and fewer people buy singles; instead, we decide on our favorite DJs and let them buy them for us. Why spend your life obsessively searching for obscure records (in which case you're probably a DJ anyway) when you can buy a DJ-mixed compilation CD made by someone who does that for a living? You could say that these days we don't buy particular records, we buy particular DJs.

1950-1970: It is generally forgotten that the very first DJs were Jamaicans operating bass-heavy outdoor mobile sound systems. At that time - the late fifties and sixties - the DJ was the person talking live over the records, the 'selector' spinned a selection of American black dance music from the South and East of the United States. In 1967, DJ Kool Herc moved from his native Jamaica to New York, and while he adjusted his musical selection to better fit the New York party crowd, he stayed true to the sound system philosophy, bringing recorded music to open air venues, playing a loud bass and talkin' over the records. In the early seventies, the first private after hour clubs , invitation-only rent parties and 'discotheques' give a new twist to New York nightlife.

The Loft, hosted by David Mancuso, made Soul Makossa of Manu Dibango the first "discotheque" record - it crossed over and disco was born. Larry Levan stands at the crossroads of disco and house. He was the legendary DJ who for more than 10 years held court at the New York night club Paradise Garage. Quite a number of today's most successful producers and DJs credit their first exposure to Larry's music at the Paradise Garage as a moment that changed their lives forever and inspired their whole careers. The eighties were dominated by drugs and DJ cultus.

The New York disco scene expanded into Chicago, by way of Frankie Knuckles, who invented house in the process. And while the disco was instrumental in the development of disco, for the nineties genres like house, techno, trance and garage - to name a few - the DJ became the pop star of the dancefloor.