In 2024, there have never been more places for a DJ to find and access new music to play in their sets. Many DJs purchase their music from an online marketplace like Beatport, while others are members of an exclusive pool of record collections. Many DJs also double as producers and make their music to play in their DJ sets or send out in promo pools (yet another way music gets shared).
The point is…
There has never been a time when music is more accessible, which is incredibly exciting but also a little daunting for those looking to start DJing and don’t know where to start building their collection. Well, this guide is already comprehensive enough; let’s cut to the chase and dive into everything you need to know about where DJs get their music and how they prep it for their next live performance.
Wondering how to unearth hidden gems on Spotify for your DJ sets? Learn from ‘How to Find New Music on Spotify to DJ: Crate Digging Tips for the World’s Largest Streaming Platform’ – enhance your playlist here.
Where DJs Find New Music To Play
Before anything else, DJs need to find the music they want to play. This is the first step of the entire process, and by the end of the initial curation process, DJs likely have hundreds of potential tracks to sift through to find the ones they plan on purchasing and downloading for their gigs.
Don’t think you must head to the record shop and spend all day listening to records to find 2-3 tracks to add to your collections. Relying on a few tools can help expedite the process, allowing you to find hundreds of potential records in just a few hours of digital crate digging.
Here are a few places we go when we are looking to maximize our music discovery online in just a short time.
Radio Shows
Tons of professional DJs these days host weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly radio shows that are a repository of unique, fresh, and current music. The DJs at the very top often get the hottest records weeks or months ahead of their official releases. Listening to their radio shows can be a great way to discover music you love that’s being supported by the DJs you admire.
Curious about radio’s role in today’s music scene? Discover ‘Why Radio Airplay Still Matters: The Undervalued Significance of Radio Support in the Age of Digital Music’ – explore the impact here.
Radio shows have the added benefit of letting you hear what the track sounds like in a mix. When listening to previews of tracks, it’s easy to imagine what they would sound like in a live set or gig, only to have them fall flat when mixed alongside other records. Most of these DJs include the tracklists in the radio show descriptions, allowing you to easily save the ones you’re digging into your cart on iTunes or Beatport to purchase before your next gig.
UOAK’s Serkora Radio and David Hohme’s Welcome Hohme Radio are both amazing resources for music discovery.
Friends and Colleagues
This is a recommendation for DJs actively playing gigs and involved in their local or regional scenes, but getting recommendations from other DJs playing your vibe and sound can be an invaluable resource for new music discovery.
Even using some of the more modern approaches to crate-digging outlined in this article, it can still be incredibly labor-intensive to filter through the vast amount of records being released daily. But many hands make light work, and getting your friends and fellow DJ recommendations can save you time and energy and help you find the hidden and unheard gems.
Making friends with fellow DJs also has the benefit of getting you access to unreleased demos and WIPs that your producer/DJ friends need to test out before their official release!
Podcasts
This aligns with the radio show idea mentioned above, but often, podcasts have a rotating roster of DJs that come on the show. So if you’re a fan of a specific label, like Anjunadeep, you can follow their podcast featuring different artists and DJs releasing on the label in their weekly podcast episodes.
This is a great way to discover new music from a wider swath of curators and is a great way to find music that fits a certain niche without pigeonholing itself too much by what a single artist is doing.
Tracklists
This is a small secret I wish I had discovered earlier in my career as a DJ. Sites like 1001Tracklists are constantly updating the tracklists of the DJ sets from almost all of the top DJs and their gigs worldwide. If you need a fast and easy way to find what your favorite DJs play actively playing, this is the best site to do it.
Just search for the DJ you are looking to glean track selections from, scroll through their set lists, and copy/paste the songs into Spotify or Beatport. Give these songs a quick preview to see if you like the main ideas of the songs, and save the ones you like for a deeper listen later. It’s one of the easiest ways to cover a lot of musical ground quickly, and when we rush for new and crowd-tested selections for an upcoming gig, this method always delivers.
Check Out 1001Tracklist Here
How DJs Get Music To Play In DJ Sets
Once you have a large collection of potential tracks that all caught your attention at first glance, it’s time to start weeding out the ones you don’t want to spend money on. Just because there are a few main marketplaces for electronic music, there are also other sources to purchase, support, and snag new music as well to add to your hard drive.
Need More Music For Your DJ Sets? Check Out Our Massive, No-BS List Of The Best D&B Bootlegs To Grace The Internet
Beatport
Beatport is the big Kahuna for downloading and purchasing new music for your next DJ gig, and for good reason. Beatport has many different resources that make finding new music and supporting the labels and artists you love easier than ever.
You can follow artists or labels you love so that you never miss their next release, artists can curate charts of their favorite releases so that you can see what your favorite artists are playing, and they even host charts so you can see the week’s top-selling tracks of each genre and style.
The image above shows how easy it is to support and download music from one label. Times that by the thousands of amazing labels on Beatport and you have a streamlined process for getting high-quality tracks onto your hard drive and ready for your next gig.
Searching for music sources beyond Beatport for your DJ sets? Explore ‘Beatport Alternatives: 6 Other Places to Find and Download Music for Your DJ Sets’ – expand your library here.
iTunes
iTunes remains one of the best places to download and purchase music to add to your DJ library. Where the Beatport above focused primarily on electronic dance music, iTunes sells almost every genre under the sun. So if you are an open-format DJ looking for a wide swath of genres, from hip-hop to dance and beyond, then iTunes is the best place to purchase your music.
iTunes also has a multitude of different music organization tools as well, the most powerful of these being their various playlisting, tagging, and metadata functionalities that allows you to find and call upon songs from a massive collection quickly and easily.
The playlisting feature alone makes iTunes still the preferred music platform of many of the old-school DJs we know.
Record Pools
Record Pools are a powerful way to instantly access a ton of music and are the preferred method for newer DJs looking to get their first collections off the ground. There are a ton of different record pools that you can join, and they usually just require a small subscription fee for you to join them.
Once you join a record pool, you can access thousands of tracks that you can rate, download, and access for your next gig. Many record pools these days function more as a record community, allowing you to meet other DJs, talk about music, swap demos, and so much more.
Not all record pools are the same, though, and few have evolved and kept up with the times since record pools were first popularized. BPM Supreme is a killer service whose fast and easy interface allows you to quickly and easily sift through their host music and download the perfect records to add to your collection and play at your next gig.
Learn More About Their Platform and Services Here
Promo Services
Promo services like Inflyte are a fantastic way that DJs and record labels send out early copies of their releases. Most promo services allow you to download these promos completely for free! But there is a catch…
Most labels and artists need to add your email to their promotional list.
Know that you will have a better shot at being included on these promo lists if you are a professional curator yourself and have your own popular radio show, or Spotify playlist, or are an actively touring DJ who is likely to support the free music you are receiving.
Free Apps and Platforms
If you are just looking at getting into DJing or are simply looking to start building your collection on a budget, there are a handful of places you can find free music to add to your collection. Here are some of the tried and true places to download and access new music!
Soundcloud
Despite its many shortcomings, SoundCloud still has a ton of amazing features for getting your music out to the masses. Unlike other streaming platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud allows artists to offer their music as free downloads.
And while the majority of SoundCloud’s user-base has shifted away from the platform, the producer/DJ community is as strong as ever and it still remains an entirely valid way for DJs to share their free downloads with the world (if they can get around Soundcloud’s copyright strikes that is). Eelke Kleijn said in a recent interview that he finds great music on Soundcloud, including one of his favorite remixes of 2022 from Solee.
YouTube
YouTube can be another powerful place to access music for free, and no I am not talking about ripping poor-quality MP3 files from the platform. Despite Spotify having an undisputed reign over streaming platforms, YouTube also has a sizable number of people streaming music.
As such, many artists are using YouTube to release their free downloads and demos. And with YouTube’s search engine being powered by Google, discovering free music is easier than ever.
What DJs Do Once They’ve Downloaded Their Music
Once the tracks are downloaded in high-quality, lossless audio, it’s time to start prepping them to play at your next gig. Don’t assume that all you need is the same mp3 file that you would use on an iPod or something; there is a lot more organization, metadata, and more that must be in place for you to quickly and easily choose the perfect song for the perfect moment at your gig.
Normalize The Volume
While you would think there would be an industry-standard volume that all music would be uploaded for distribution at, this is simply not the case. There is always small volume discrepancies in between songs that might seem minimal when listening on smaller headphones but can really take the wind out of your sails when you’re playing live only to discover the volume of one drop is a decibel quieter than the drop before hand.
Luckily, apps play Platinum Notes from mixed-in key and normalize all of the audio files that you run through it, ensuring that all of the tracks in your library are of the exact sample volume.
Find Out The Key
This is likely to be more relevant for DJs looking to mix and play more melodic-focused music like trance or progressive house, but labeling the proper keys of all the tracks so that each song in the mix sounds like it “belongs” with the track before it is vital. The last thing you want is to have a two-minute-long transition where the two playing songs sound completely dissonant from each other.
Mixed In Key, the same company that brought us Platinum Notes above, identifies the key of all of the tracks in your library and even goes as far as to rename the files so that the titles of the songs have the key in them. But don’t worry, you don’t need to know complex music theory to get the most out of a platform like this.
Mixed In Key’s Camelot Wheel system assigns each key to a numerical value, meaning all you need to do is ensure the number of one key is within a single integer of the key before and the tracks have a fairly solid chance of sounding like they are “in key” with each other.
Import The Songs Into Your Digital Crate
Once the two different programs have edited and manipulated the song files, it’s time to bring the record collection you have recently acquired into your digital crate. These digital crates are the three most common: Rekordbox, Traktor, and Serato.
These platforms allow you to do the rest of the heavy lifting needed to prep your music, playlists, and files for your next gig. There is so much to discuss in this section alone that we will likely have to save it for another article entirely. So until then, know that it’s essential that these digital crates act as the middleman between the raw audio files and playing the music out on CDJs or a controller.
Set Up Cue Points
Once the music is imported into your digital crate, the first thing you will want to do is to start setting up cue points on the music. Cue points allow you to do so many things but require a bit of due diligence and legwork up front and at home before you can use them to your advantage in your next gig:
- Cue points allow you to cue up only the best part of each record, meaning you transition into the song at the precise moment that you’d like.
- Cue points act as visual markers so you know when to start cueing out of one song and into the next true you have on the decks.
- Cue points allow you to quickly audition a song in your playlist, letting you hear a short section of the record in your headphones before you decide to bring it in for the dance floor to hear.
Back Up Your Files
This is the biggest thing of them all; be sure to back up your library of tracks.
It is a travesty that a DJ never assumes will happen to them until their hard drive crashes hours before a massive gig. Always be sure to back up your work, music, and. files every time you make a meaningful change to your library or track selection. Your future self will thank you.
Pro Tips For Digital Crate Diggers In 2023
DJing has come a long way, even in the past couple of years. And while it might feel Romantic to spend your entire day scouring the dusty vinyl shops for an underground micro-house groover to play at your next gig, living in the digital world afford us many luxuries.
Here are a few fast-and-easy tips for digital crate digging along with some things to avoid in the modern age of DJing.
Curious about the tracks that reshaped electronic dance music? Discover ’20 Songs That Redefined Electronic Dance Music Throughout the 2000s’ – uncover the list here.
Only Collect What You Love (…And Plan On Playing)
Music has never been more accessible, and there has never been a more tempting time to download every record that piques your interest. But a digital record collection adds up quickly and you can quickly outspend the money you make at one gig on records you want to play at the next.
This is why I advise you only to purchase the records you know you will 100% play in your sets for years to come. Not only will it make you hyper-critical about the music you invest your hard-earned money into, but it will make your sets memorable. Plus it will force you to get more mileage out of your tracks, rinsing through a few of your favorite records many times over a handful of gigs instead of having to learn new music and transitions for every set.
Listen To The Entire Song Before You Purchase It (…Don’t Just Preview The Drops)
Even if a track has an fantastic drop section, the song can still lose your dance floor for many reasons. Maybe the break is too long or the vocal sample used is corny enough to turn off some of the crowd. You will only notice these things if you listen to the track. Don’t just commit to purchasing a song before you like an 8 or 16-bar loop within the track…
Interested in discovering Spotify’s hidden talents? Delve into ‘How to Discover the Best Unknown Artists on Spotify’ – uncover the underrated here.
Keep Playlists (…Both Of Your Real Gigs And Your Hypothetical Ones)
After you’ve been DJing for a few years, you’ll start to accumulate a wide selection of music that is likely comprised of thousands of tracks. There will be no way to keep them organized, even in your library, unless you constantly curate and create playlists to classify that music.
For a standard hour-long gig, it’s completely normal to prep a couple of different playlists of songs so that you are ready for whatever the night throws at you. Make sure to save the playlists that worked well so that you can return to them later and find your favorite songs of yesteryear when you are looking for killer throwback music.
But that’s not all…
Make playlists even for gigs that you’re not playing. Not only will this help you keep your curation skills sharp and honed, but it will also help further categorize the music in your catalog and force you to think outside the box when collecting and saving like-sounding music.
Use Modern Resources To Find Gems (…Instead Of Thinking You Need To Crate Dig The Old School Way)
We’ve already touched upon this a few times throughout this article, but it begs repeating as a closing argument. There are an unending amount of resources in which DJs and producers can find new and exciting music to play in their sets and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you heed the naysayers who think that the only way to really be a DJ is to go to a record shop and crate dig the old fashioned way.
The only thing that matters at the end of the day (or at the start of the night – depending on your time slot) is whether or not you can make the crowd move and the best way to make that happen is to have the best possible collection of amazing music. Hell, it doesn’t even need to be the latest, freshest, unreleased music – the crowd likely won’t know or care.
What’s most important is that you curate an hour, or two, or three, or however long your set is of amazing music that is an extension of yourself as an artist. After that, the rest will fall into place.
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- Intrigued by how introverts excel in DJing? Read ‘An Introvert’s Guide to DJing: Advice on Stage Presence for the Shy Selector’ – gain unique insights here.
Will Vance is a professional music producer who has been involved in the industry for the better part of a decade and has been the managing editor at Magnetic Magazine since mid-2022. In that time period, he has published thousands of articles on music production, industry think pieces and educational articles about the music industry. Over the last decade as a professional music producer, Will Vance has also ran multiple successful and highly respected record labels in the industry, including Where The Heart Is Records as well as having launched a new label with a focus on community through Magnetic Magazine. When not running these labels or producing his own music, Vance is likely writing for other top industry sites like Waves or the Hyperbits Masterclass or working on his upcoming book on mindfulness in music production. On the rare chance he's not thinking about music production, he's probably running a game of Dungeons and Dragons with his friends which he has been the dungeon master for for many years.
