· Founder of Vinyl Pusher Records – Australia’s premier Dance record label and publisher (highly influential between the early 2000s and up until a few year ago, being the only local label to press promos on vinyl)
· DJ and producer for 30 years – his involvement in dance music started back in 1981, spinning Hip-Hop tunes and establishing one of the first break dance crews in Australia, going on to perform live with the world famous New York break dance crew ‘The Rock Steady Crew”
· His creative DJ style quickly established him at the time as one of the leading new DJ talents in the Australian scene
· His love and continuous hunger for innovative new flavours led him in 1987 to establish the first recording studio in Australia solely dedicated to Dance Music – the dream of launching his own record label began
· The journey to realise this dream took many twists and turns, from being one of the first endorsed Pioneer Pro DJs in the world in 1997 – along with Roger Sanchez and Phil K – touring and preaching to the world “the CDJ1000 will change everything”, to co-producing a wide range of dance music genres from Psy-Trance and Techno to Italo-House, and collaborating with labels like Psy-Harmonics, Colossal Records and Media Records
· In 2002 he quickly realised that the dance scene was becoming stale, Techno had its run and House was not really cutting trough but his hometown of Melbourne was to change all of that with a new movement of music producers that were coming on the scene, such as: Dirty South, TV Rock, and many more. Electro was here and the times were a changing. Vinyl Stores where too slow to react, so Don together with close friend and dance music aficionado Vince Panagiotidis established what became the number one vinyl DJ store in Australia, Capital DJ – the birth palace of Vinyl Pusher Records. The shop also gained global notoriety, frequented by visiting international DJs, including Deadmau5, Steve Angelo, James Zabiela, Yousef, Alex Kid, Simon Dunmore, ATFC, Axwell, Copyright, Audiowhores, Shakedown, Jeff Mills and The Orb, all visiting while on tour and some times performing at the store.
· Don Steele finally founded Vinyl Pusher in 2003 and realised his dream of owning a record label. The label quickly established itself as a driving force for dance music in Australia and around the world with releases by J Nitti, Morgan Page, Fedde Le Grand, Inaya Day, Firefox, TV Rock, CeCe Peneston and the list goes on. Vinyl Pusher also licenced music to other international dance Labels like Ministry of Sound, Hed Kandi and Defected.
· Don Steele’s DJ style reflects his career path of always searching for good dance music, never compromising but always entertaining, he favours dropping DJ sets of House, Tribal and Tech House with some surprises in between that always keep the dance floor asking for more.
· Don Steele is also an entrepreneur, a side of him that has seen him develop products and marketing strategies for companies like Harley Davidson, Pioneer and Buchla Synthesisers. Don Steele was part of the core team that developed the Pioneer Pro DJ brand for Pioneer Global Japan. Today Don is the owner and director of 4 companies, including Steele Works a Software development/ digital marketing company, PDI a company that develops long distance shooting products and Kestrel AU a scientific product company distributing products globally.
