A license to spin

Santos also cited cases of DJs who worked for decades and were now indigent because there was no official record of the work that qualified them for government benefits.

Several calls to Senator Tuma’s cellphone were unsuccessful, but his reasoning is clear from an argument he makes in the legislation.

“We have before us a new form of work, a new profession...and that new profession is not regulated by legislation current in place,” he is quoted as saying.

Some in the DJ world expressed cautious support.

Camilo Rocha, a Sao Paulo-based DJ, said he considers the legislation well intentioned, and possibly very helpful to non-celebrity, working class DJs who have little job security. "But there's another side of it that is quite cloudy," he said. "It remains to be seen to what extent thing is going to paralyze things, to make things more bureaucratic."

He said he had never heard of SINDECS, and blamed them for not building a wider support base among DJs before the legislation was written.

The proposed law could stand to benefit those in the DJ-training business, said Wendel Vicente, owner of Beatmasters, a DJ school that he said had trained some of the country’s best known DJs. Though he understands the reasoning, he is wary of how the law would be implemented.

“We need to be certain about who is in charge of enforcement, of evaluation of DJs,” he said. “Who is that person? Who is going to decide who gets to be a DJ? If everything in Brazil is so messed up, how can we know that the DJ profession won’t get messed up, too?”

Dos Santos noted that the law provides for established DJs to be certified without going back to school. He also noted that he plans to revisit several points that have caused backlash; the senator said much the same thing when he called in to the MTV debate on Tuesday.

The 70 percent figure is one of those sticky points. Article 25 reads that “Events using foreign professionals must obligatorily have at least 70 percent participation by Brazilian DJs.” That would mean, theoretically, that French celebrity DJ David Guetta’s show at the Pacha nightclub in Florianopolis over Carnival — so well attended it caused total traffic mayhem and a several-hour post-midnight back-up — would need to have added three Brazilian DJs to the bill. But dos Santos said the article was only meant to apply to big festivals.

The United States doesn’t have legislation regulating the DJ profession, said the president of the American Disk Jockey Association, who is known professionally as Dr. Drax. Some DJs have tried to pressure American legislators to do so in the past, he said, but his organization is against it.

"It’s essentially job protectionism,” he said, arguing that those who promote it are inferior DJs who want protection from outsiders. “My response is, this isn’t brain surgery. Nobody’s going to die from a bad DJ.”

GlobalPost on licensing bouncers in Madrid: Tears for fears

More GlobalPost dispatches from Brazil:

Adventures in Brazilian bureaucracy

Favellywood: Hollywood's new hotspot

Think everyone likes Carnival? Think again.

Global Blogs:

• Latest

More Dispatches:

• Latest

Sponsored Links

Prom Dresses
Brokers Online Health Insurance
Casino News
drug addiction treatment
P90X
Credit Card