The set was never the DJ's alone. It has always been a negotiation between the person behind the decks and the room in front of them, a back and forth that neither party fully controls and both are constantly shaping.
The crowd writes the set too. With their energy, their resistance, their bodies. A floor that doesn't respond to a build tells the DJ something important. A room that surges when a track drops tells them something else entirely. The DJ reads those signals and adjusts, which produces new signals, which produce new adjustments. What looks like a performance is actually a conversation, one where the audience doesn't know they're speaking.
That's the thing. The crowd's authorship has always been real, just invisible. Distributed across hundreds of people making thousands of small physical choices that collectively steer the night somewhere nobody planned in advance. The DJ gets the credit because the DJ is visible and the crowd is not. But take the crowd out of the room and you don't have a different set. You have a different art form.
What changes when that authorship becomes explicit isn't the dynamic itself, that stays exactly the same. What changes is who understands they're participating in it.