Globalize my music collection?

Well as a DJ who has traveled a bit I have to say it is OKish as long as it is westernized. So collecting tunes from US and Europe, while different tastes here and there it is still easy to match.
If you go Asia or Afrika or even South America this becomes very very difficult.
Now I had not that many problems in South America, because if you are a foreign DJ they will still dance to the tunes you put on the decks, they are quite forgiving and open to new stuff.

But go to Korea and that is different. Now you can mix in some international stuff, but you have also have some knowledge about K-Pop, K-Trance, K-House,…. it is a totally different world. It took me a month to only scratch the surface and survive my gigs in one piece and I had several K-DJs to help me out. China is even worse as it is totally regional.

So to keep your collection global over a longer period of time: No chance.

In this day and age, music is global. In all the countries of the western world and loads of places outside of it, all music is available to just about everybody and at the same time. What is liked and what is not is dependent on the local/regional or national taste and developments.

If a track from a certain country became popular in YOUR country at some time, then by all means use it in your collection, but if it never made it to YOUR country, do you really want to risk emptying out a dance floor just for “differentiation” purposes?

People hire DJs because they can make people dance and stay longer than they would without a good DJ. Not because he/she plays Chinese and Australian music.

Good examples are Love in C Minor and Supernature by Cerrone, they score high (top 5) in many of the “best disco/dance tracks ever” lists. That is, the ones based on results in the US. It’s a track that never made it to the Dutch dance floors. What is considered one of the highest scoring dance tracks from it’s day in the US, would clear out a dance floor here in Holland faster than I could say “thank you and come again”. When I was a full time resident in the mid 80s, I worked for a UK outfit and they sent me tracks every couple of weeks. Some of it was great, generic and I could play it wherever (I played in Germany, London, Kuwait & Baghdad to name a few places) and some of it was just too British. So, I’d always visit the local shops to find out what was hot locally, including some of the leading national/regional artists. But that was because I was in THEIR world. I never used that music at the next place, because it would be a different scene again.

There are so many things to focus on when trying to become the best DJ you can be. My personal opinion is that the time spent in acquiring and mastering all these foreign tracks and figuring out the best way to incorporate them into your set is a lot of work for a minimum of gain. And it could even backfire as people love tracks they know and are usually weary of tracks they never heard before.