With Serato now having a public beta of 2.1, containing both TIDAL and SoundCloud, plus Beatport’s new DJ streaming service getting ever closer (and with Virtual DJ and djay Pro having had streaming for years via Spotify and “ContentUnlimited” respecitively), streaming music in DJ sets is definitely “having a moment”.
Yet a lot of the dialogue online about it sounds suspiciously familiar. “It’s making it too easy for new DJs!”, or, “It’s going to create a generation of DJs who don’t know how to crate dig,” and so on sound much like how DJs spoke of the sync button a few years back (which is now of course pretty much universally accepted as a creative aid, not a cheat).
On top of this, there are misconceptions around how it actually works, leading to people saying things like “There’s no WiFi where I DJ,” or, “I wouldn’t want to rely on an internet connection,” when actually that’s not the problem it seems.
However, there ARE valid concerns about this, around music quality, how having fingertip access to 10 million tracks may hinder rather than help DJs, and of course about what happens to your music if your favourite service goes out of business.
In this half-hour video, which was a #TuesdayTipsLive over on our Facebook and YouTube channels, we dive into some of these topics, to help you get a better idea about whether it’s time YOU jumped onto the streaming bandwagon in your DJing. We look at use cases and best practices, and we answer questions about streaming.
We hope you enjoy it, and don’t forget to give feedback, ask questions, like, share and subscribe if you find this stuff useful.