Staying ontop of your music

[Spife]

Or, "why can't I hold all these tracks?!"

Seriously, I just use soundcloud and beatport (trying to integrate a few forums into my field of vision) for track "income" and there are just to many tracks! I hardly have the time to stay on top of tracks being released, and I definitely don't have the money, nor the time to organize them all.



What do you guys do? How do you stay on top of all the music relevant to you and your interests?

[LukeDent]

I try not to worry to much about finding tracks as they're released straight away. But then again I am quite a relaxed dj and not very professional.

As for organising them. Set a day aside to trawl through all your music and organise it in whichever way you find comfortable and then whenever you buy new music file it away there and then so you don't have backlogs of tracks getting lost in your library.

[Sublim&All]

Higher your standards and skip faster through the incoming tracks. If a track does not impress you after 10 or 20 seconds, just leave it and get on. In the end, those are the tracks you may have bought with high hopes but eventually will not play anyway, as there are enough better tracks already.

and for the organization of your library: remove 'old' tracks you don't play anymore, out of your library. It may feel like a waste of money, but as you don't play them they are simply of no use anymore and only clog up your collection.

[disparate]

There's no real shortcut, it just requires loads of time. I gave up on Beatport for digging long ago though, takes far too long to find anything good.

[DJ Highline]

Higher your standards and skip faster through the incoming tracks. If a track does not impress you after 10 or 20 seconds, just leave it and get on. In the end, those are the tracks you may have bought with high hopes but eventually will not play anyway, as there are enough better tracks already.

^^^This. Also try out some music subscription services like Promo Only. Their entire job is to figure out what songs are going to do well and get them to you. They have a ton of different formats to choose from and even have a record pool thing now. Record Pools are another great way to stay on top of your music. You pay a monthly fee and you can download whatever you want from their collection. I use DJ city and its pretty awesome. Watch the charts to see what songs are rising and what songs are lingering around the top for a long time.




and for the organization of your library: remove 'old' tracks you don't play anymore, out of your library. It may feel like a waste of money, but as you don't play them they are simply of no use anymore and only clog up your collection.

I don't agree with this, I don't like the idea of deleting songs from your collection. What I do to organize my music is put it in playlist or crates or whatever your software calls it. This is where I put songs that I will play alot. When I stop playing them, I may delete them from the playlist but not from the collection. This way 5 years from now if I want to play that song I still have it. Plus with digital, storage is cheap and small. A 100 GB drive takes up as much physical space as a 500GB drive.

[Sublim&All]

I don't agree with this, I don't like the idea of deleting songs from your collection. What I do to organize my music is put it in playlist or crates or whatever your software calls it. This is where I put songs that I will play alot. When I stop playing them, I may delete them from the playlist but not from the collection. This way 5 years from now if I want to play that song I still have it. Plus with digital, storage is cheap and small. A 100 GB drive takes up as much physical space as a 500GB drive.

Yeah that's what I meant, you shouldn't actually delete the tracks completely of course :P

[Lost Connection]

I use zipdj, and whenever I download tracks, I store the .zip file into a folder with the other zip files. They're numbered from 1-->
Then I extract it into a different folder and organize the tracks into the subfolders I use. It's handy to have the zip files as a back up, because they're easy to move around as a bunch and you can extract a single track from the file too.

You could also try a software to organize your tracks, mediamonkey is one example.

[KLH]

What do you guys do? How do you stay on top of all the music relevant to you and your interests?
I try to listen to as much music as I can - especially when driving, exercising, working, and sometimes even sleeping. Being a DJ doesn't matter in this regard. I simply love music.

I think that you're asking about learning tracks for DJing. That's slightly different, because you may have to know tracks that you don't like. That's a bit harder.

As a mobile DJ, most of my events skew to Top-40 (for younger crowds) and rock (for older crowds), so learning new music is easy. As I always pepper my events with some EDM (for energy purposes, and sh*t, I just love it), finding new "my crowd" friendly EDM can be a challenge.

If I want to go off the beaten path, I use Beatport and FaderWave Radio. Beatport usually has the newest stuff. FWR - the DJF live DJ showcase found here (http://www.stickam.com/faderwaveradio) - is incredible. You really get a sense of how to transition to and from the track. I must admit, I'm addicted to FWR.

-KLH

[cambria1295]

I try to listen to as much music as I can - especially when driving, exercising, working, and sometimes even sleeping. Being a DJ doesn't matter in this regard. I simply love music.

I think that you're asking about learning tracks for DJing. That's slightly different, because you may have to know tracks that you don't like. That's a bit harder.

As a mobile DJ, most of my events skew to Top-40 (for younger crowds) and rock (for older crowds), so learning new music is easy. As I always pepper my events with some EDM (for energy purposes, and sh*t, I just love it), finding new "my crowd" friendly EDM can be a challenge.

If I want to go off the beaten path, I use Beatport and FaderWave Radio. Beatport usually has the newest stuff. FWR - the DJF live DJ showcase found here (http://www.stickam.com/faderwaveradio) - is incredible. You really get a sense of how to transition to and from the track. I must admit, I'm addicted to FWR.

-KLH

If you are looking for edm music I have found this site really useful, you cannot really buy music directly but there is usually a link or you can just search it up.
http://www.electrojams.com

[Atomisk]

I don't really mean to derail this thread, but if you play a fair amount of mashups, learning to make your own mashups and edits can help supplement you with material for shows. Obviously it's no substitute for new music but it can help fill up space if you're running thin on tracks to play! It can also help you with "exclusive" material... No one else can play your edits if you don't give them out.

As for looking for new stuff - twitter is great for keeping up with artists/labels you like. I'm following about 900 music related accounts on twitter so I always see promos for songs from producers I know are relevant to my tastes.

[DJ Matt]

Higher your standards and skip faster through the incoming tracks. If a track does not impress you after 10 or 20 seconds, just leave it and get on. .

LOL im not so sure about this

music can appeal to us on many levels and sometimes it takes a little longer than 20 seconds to understand the charm of a given song. sometimes it requires many listens.
one thing i noticed is if i buy an album in MP3 format it often gets the 20 second treatment, but if i buy it on CD it goes into my car for a week or more, i will discover aspects to that album i would have missed out on and more often, they DO work on the dancefloor.

my way of trying to minimise the amount of music i have to listen to, is i listen to other DJs and promoters top 10 selections as a way to guide me straight to the good stuff and work from there.
and i also speak to as many people as i can to find out their likes and dislikes, that way you can save listening time and please the people on the dancefloor.
for my residency i have a facebook page where people can post song requests during the week.


for music you hate, well technology is your friend. give it a quick listen and then attach comments about it , describing the mood of the song, the popularity of the song, dancibility etc.....(assuming you use a computer) this way you can remind yourself what the song it like, and dont have to keep on listening to it



I try to listen to as much music as I can - especially when driving, exercising, working, and sometimes even sleeping. Being a DJ doesn't matter in this regard. I simply love music.
-KLH

+ 1 on that

music is my life ! i will DJ all night and out of all attendees at the event i will probably be the only one who will turn on some music as soon as i wake up the next morning lol

[Era 7]

Higher your standards and skip faster through the incoming tracks. If a track does not impress you after 10 or 20 seconds, just leave it and get on. In the end, those are the tracks you may have bought with high hopes but eventually will not play anyway, as there are enough better tracks already.

this.

also i search for different styles of music on different websites than might have a better collection or organization than allmighty beatport.

beatport is good for most prog house, electro house and trance. but with other genres they are lacking. i wandered off to trackitdown for hardcore and tech-trance and for hardstyle to hardstyle.com because the selection is just so much better because i have the ability to search exclussively for what i am really looking for and they got the magic ability to label their stuff correctly (i'm looking at you beatport). you have to weed through much less shit when searching on the more specific websites (TID also has a rating system for tracks which gives you an up front indicator whether the track is worth listening to).

in addition i listen to as many mixes as i can and try to find tracklist to search for new artist that might have good stuff out there but aren't really known now.

[mantis]

...learning to make your own mashups and edits can help supplement you with material for shows. Obviously it's no substitute for new music but it can help fill up space if you're running thin on tracks to pl....
how do u make mashups? this might be a good idea