Why do club DJs not play a whole song anymore? They just play (if we're lucky) 20 seconds of a bunch of songs.

Showing off their the fact that they know many, many great dance songs, thus putting as much as possible in one set?
Maybe the crowd should agree on doing an immobile flash mob the moment he breaks a cool song off again.

I wonder if it has anything to do with not paying the license fee on partial plays?

because sampling different songs doesn’t require them to get permission from the original artist. playing the whole song would.

have you ever heard of Girl Talk? he’s a dj and all of his songs are sometimes hundreds of samples of different songs. he never gets permission but it’s usually too little of a chunk of song for the actual artist to worry about anyhow.

There was a radio interview with a local hip hop duo on the other day, and they were explaining how they create their music. One thing they spoke about was how in the evolution of hip hop, DJs would note that certain segments of songs got the crowd moving, so they learned to just loop the segment and throw out the rest. So that evolutionary track might be one explanation, but I bet @YARNLADY has it better.

Most copyright stuff on that level goes unenforced, though, so I couldn’t speculate one way or the other.

I think they do it for that “Ohhhh shiiittt” effect you’re talking about. Same reasons why if you frequent the same club, you’ll hear the same music, over and over again. Same reason you hear the same songs on the radio, over and over again.

I agree, it’s annoying. Just play the goddamn song and shut up – then switch to another.