The brand Pioneer DJ (or more accurately, the word Pioneer) has been a core part of DJ lexicon for decades now. The first Pioneer CDJ came out in 1994, and from there a steady stream of sturdy, club-ready mixers, media players, and controllers came out, cementing Pioneer’s reputation in the DJ market.
When the DJ technology branch of Pioneer span off into its own thing back in 2014, they appended the ‘DJ’ to the name, and continued their rise to the top of the pile, seemingly unstoppable. The name Pioneer is pretty much the only one uttered in the same sentence as ‘club’ or ‘festival’, and has become the aspirational brand for DJs around the world. Then, Pioneer DJ was bought out by an investment company, and ultimately, the parent company was renamed to AlphaTheta Corporation.
Now, they’ve started branding DJ hardware as AlphaTheta.
No, man! No!
Look, I get why moving away from the name Pioneer DJ makes sense. There’s a whole other consumer audio brand attached to the name, and if there’s any DJ tech company that can survive through sheer marketshare power, it’s them. On top of that, there could even be legacy licensing issues associated with the name. But, there’s no getting past the fact the name Alpha Theta sounds like (well, literally is) a raucus college fraternity, filled with obnoxious dudebros, shit beer, and lowest common denominator festival EDM played on cheap controllers connected to overextended Sonos boomboxes via Bluetooth.
It doesn’t even matter how good the hardware is (and, let’s face it, Pioneer hardware is generally going to be decent but expensive), because people are going to have to say the words out loud and take them seriously.
Basically, call it anything but AlphaTheta. Or, we may just have to start every sentence that mentions it with the word ‘bro’.