I was just using it to be funny. I don't know if anyone does that. And I mean "you" as "you understood", not a particular person. (for the second part of my comment atleast)
I definitely believe you should give it your all every time you play in public. The night has to start somewhere. If it starts late then by all means, get on it. If it's 10pm and the place is just opened you need to coax people and vest them into staying and dancing.
Well...back then I did...don't Forget it was nearly 20 years ago...There was no other choice possible if I wanted to Play other Sound than all the other DJs did or if I wanted to have the New Releases before everyone else already played them to death.
Remember those times there was no DJ-Pool Online, No Secure Online Payment, No iTunes-Shop, etc...
And most important of all: There was no law prohibiting Torrent, Peer2Peer, etc...
And if you are talking about the Quality of the tunes, well if the Quality of the Sound Systems over here would be High-End in every Venue, well then the Quality of the Tracks would Play a huge role but Owners here mostly have no clue about Technic, they invest once and think it's done with it that even after 30 years the Sound System is OK, they never invest in maintenance and never invest in New stuff...so even a bad ripped 192k Mp3 is not really an issue.
Mos definitely. Just hard for me to grasp such things in the 90's as I was playing strictly vinyl up until 2012. For me, in order to stay ahead of the game, I relied on keeping in touch with artists that influenced me and getting dubplates cut or receiving dubplates from artists. I still do on the digital medium to make sure I have plenty of pre-release tunes and still only play them with permission, but don't have to shell out the $25-$50 to have a dubplate cut anymore.