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DMC World DJ Championships

The DMC World DJ Championships is an annual DJ competition founded by the Disco Mix Club (DMC) which began in 1985. It has been described as a "pre-eminent competitive DJ event".

History

Competitors are each given 6 minutes to perform, with winners selected at the end. Championships were sponsored internationally by Technics, but in 2010 Technics was replaced by Serato and Rane. Since 2011, the vinyl emulation software Serato Scratch Live can be used during the competition in addition to traditional vinyl.

The first championship, held in the London Hippodrome in 1985, was won by Londoner Roger Johnson. From 1992 to 1994 American DJ Qbert dominated the competition, until being asked to step down in order to "level the playing field". In 2017 the Bronx-born Puerto Rican DJ Perly became the first woman to win the DMC United States finals. She went on to earn fourth place in the world finals in London later that year, the highest-placing female to that date.

In 2020 and 2021, the tournament was held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 event also attracted media attention due to one of the competitors being a 9 year-old girl from Dubai.

Kalib Strickland from New Zealand, under the name DJ K-Swizz, won both the 2022 and the 2023 world events. He was reported as the youngest to win the championship and the first winner from the Southern hemisphere.

Disco Mix Club

The competition was founded in 1985 by the Disco Mix Club. The club was founded by Tony Prince in 1983 as a DJ remix label which targeted professional disc jockeys and enthusiasts instead of the mass market. It resold megamixes and remixes, and published a weekly magazine. The company also began the magazine Mixmag before it was sold to the British media group EMAP in January 1997. The club founded the world championship event "for DJs to test their skills against their peers".

Musicians who contributed megamixes to the company included Alan Coulthard, Les Adams (who was a judge on some of the earlier DMC championships), Chad Jackson, Dave Seaman, Steve Anderson, Peter Slaghuis, Paul Dakeyne, and Ben Liebrand. The Disco Mix Club itself went into voluntary liquidation in April 2023.