Back in 2006, I attended a party in San Francisco that was billed as a “Tribute 2 the Mobiles.” The event was an homage to the Bay Area mobile disc jockey crews from the 1980s, and great care was taken to replicate the sounds and sights of the era, including an array of era-appropriate speakers, lighting rigs, even a smoke machine. There was one very modern inclusion, however: in the 1980s, all the invited DJs would have been lugging crates of vinyl records, but on this night, most of them just brought a small, portable hard drive instead. Using the popular DV (digital vinyl) product, Serato Scratch Live—which most simply refer to as “Serato”—they were able to access thousands of songs from a laptop yet still play them using special vinyl records and normal turntables. As I joked at the time: carrying all that music in their pocket was a...

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