This is a topic that has been done to death in the electronic music world.
I used to do quite a bit of djing in my youth, starting at the age of 16 with some cheapy Numark vinyl turntables and moved on to Technics then CDJs and then eventually an all-digital setup. I still have 1000’s of vinyls and CDs lying round the house (much to the annoyance of the Mrs) and do enjoy playing the occasional vinyl only set for the memories but when I do play out at a party or a club nowadays I always use my digital setup because;
1. I can carry all my tunes with me, covering all bases. This is especially useful for house parties when you need to keep everyone happy across genre boundaries.
2. My controller and laptop fits into 1 handy carry case. Decks, mixer, CDJs, vinyls would fill the boot of my car and take up a load of space once set up.
The argument that vinyl is more “authentic” doesn’t wash in my opinion. Beatmatching (the art of making two different records play at the same speed in order to mix them together) isn’t hard to do with a bit of practice so the idea that people who use the sync function of a digital setup are cheating is rubbish. Sync lets you bring in and out different elements of tracks, across genres, in order to create some pretty awesome mashups on the fly. The most important skill of a DJ is to have great taste in music, set trends, and most importantly to be able to read a crowd and create an awesome party through the music that they play. What medium they use to do that is always secondary.
DJs are still called DJs because its such a well known term. Some digital artists call themselves controllerists or simply just producers.
