You can make mistakes when pressing play too… somebody on this forum mentioned Depeche Mode having to restart their crashed midi backing tracks halfway through a big live set. They had to play through the first half again, as they had no way to fastforward/skip to the crash point.
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Touché 
A band like underworld , who use ableton , seems very live … it’s pre defined chunks and largely the same structure but doesn’t get in the way of an enjoyable gig though it benefits from a lead singer
Orbital use ableton but use it to trigger more midi synths , so there’s more live tweaking of parameters but again , it’s all pre defined midi clips and generally a familiar structure to the tunes.
Fully live would surely mean no sequencers … each bass drum, snare is triggered by a human ? … even if it was I doubt anyone would care … personally I’d just be wondering why they didn’t use a sequencer and save all the effort (I don’t go to rock gigs or listen to guitar music )
Overall I like to see some interaction with gear and hear tracks that aren’t a carbon copy of the cd / commercial release.
If it’s a dj set then I prefer live mixing compared to ‘ press play and pretend’ … I don’t think the people I tend to go and see would do that.
The risk with some live techno ( for example ) is a total reliance on 4/4 basic drum pattern, dub stabs and filter sweeps … so there can be a downside too, but that can often be the actual track and not just because it’s being made live. Same risks with other genres too. Being made ‘live’ still needs structure and prep so that it’s not a long , boring , slowly evolving snooze fest.
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lol… talk about professionals…
They’ll never succeed.
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Pretty sure they can skip tracks now 
Based on recent tracks / albums that’s a good thing
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And yet a final thought completely describes my own view on the subject:
“The set is never the same,” claim Skudge. “Firstly because of the live programming, but also because new songs get added to the set constantly and because we like to use different gear as often as possible.
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I guess it is a silly distinction.
It goes the other way, too, like you’ll see ‘X-Artist - (DJ Set)’ - as if to say, this isn’t really their stuff, it’s them playing other peoples stuff.
For me Live just means, the artists original work.
And I agree, both DJ and hardware artists can sweat equally over their gear during a show.
Live should mean hardware is involved, but often it doesn’t, a live set can be a laptop and a midi controller.
As long as you don’t hit play on a 45 minute .wav file anything is game really (although I actually have seen this before, a little eq during the show and it was ‘live’).
Nothing like an artist making full techno on the spot from scratch. I’ve seen that a few times. Pretty mind blowing. That’s where it’s at really. Sure, a few patterns and sounds loaded. But fully ripping it Live and going where the machines take you, that’s another level. Kinda like modular I suppose.
For me the distinction used to come about when an act was playing two sets. The regular one was the DJ set and the Live one was their own stuff.
Well, who plays the same set over and over? I‘d grow bored very quickly, unless I was making tons of money with it… wait a minute…
…in all kinds of electronic music, the most essential difference if it’s “live” or not…
…are those persons, standing there on stage to fill the venue with music, ARE ACTUALLY the persons who created that music…
whatever their performance might look like…
no matter how many knobs they twiddle…
is it THEIR OWN CONTENT…OR NOT.
and of course, the more instruments they actually play or treat in any way, or if they even sing or speak through mics, the more it’s live…
and the term “live pa” is only valuable if some kind of live vocals/mc thing is actually part of the music…
no matter how many recordings of others a dj is mixing/scratching/matching in realtime…
and how great his/her feel for the moment might be, in picking the right tune for the right time and even creating new sonic sensations by combining and mixing…
that’s a different kind of art of it’s own again…but by no means a live performance…
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This person was on to something. You work hard (at home), give the audience what they want, have a good time in the booth and earn some cash (maybe).
Sorry if I sound cynical. Sometimes I think artists should try less hard, for the shitty pay they get, really.
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In this case I’m not so sure about “have a good time in the booth”. Unless you have a gameboy disguised as a midi controller or something.
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I think they use hard drugs for the feel good part. But a gameboy sounds like a good idea.
I’m not into drugs, I guess I miss out a lot. Anyway I’m too busy with the gear to snort in the booth 
I think artists should work exactly as hard as their art demands of them.
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Fair. You omitted my „sometimes“.
I didn’t say you should do drugs or play gameboy in the booth. I really didn’t.
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KIDS ! DON’T DO DRUGS ! OR GAMEBOYS !
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this is what I meant by interchangeable terminology, what you really are talking about is original content or not, but I don’t think that is what the op is talking about, I mean if he is talking about that then that’s a much easier question to answer.
I don’t think the main ingredient in a live performance is originality, it’s the ‘word’ performance, hence the live performance… if you are not playing anything then it’s not live, if you are playing something then it’s live… regardless of originality, that is why cover bands everywhere are considered live music and they don’t create their own music
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