DJ Pool question

Simple:
Do not do it.
If you buy/download more than 10 tracks per month, you are doing it wrong. You are using mass over quality.
10 tracks on iTunes cost you 10 bucks, any pool subscription is more.
Every 6 months buy the top-genre sampler of your choice of genre and be done with it.

I think what he ment is that if signing up for a rekord pool is always more money than buying 10 tracks a month on iTunes (for about 10 bucks). And buying more than 10 tracks a month is putting quantity over quality.

Clearly if you want to be able to play every request that is a different story, but do you download it live and use a track live you haven’t prepped properly or even listened to?

One of the greatest pitfalls in digital DJ-ing is to sign up to places where a fixed amount of money allows you to download tons of tracks. And 99% of those tracks will never be played, yet mess up and contaminate your collection.

Once your collection has the desired size (personal of course, but I believe Phil Morse has a 600 track collection!), you buy only tracks you really, really want and you toss out an existing track for every track you add. This way you will create the best possible collection (for you) as you get extremely picky about new tracks to buy and you take out the tracks that don’t make it to the top of your collection. The big bonus here is a relatively small collection that you can know intimately and that will fit entirely on any kind of medium (usb-stick, ssd, iDevice).

If you are a mobile DJ (like me) and deal with loads of requests, it pays to have your request tracks on a separate medium or seperate location on your disc and just search for any request through the file finding option of your DJ software (or even your operating system).

As a (recent – my first gig was this time last year) beginner into this, I sort of agree with what you are saying, Kai.

But – you do not need as many tracks as you think you need. I play weekly 3hr (with a couple of breaks in) sets to a crowd of people that doesn’t change that much week to week, meaning that they like to hear variation in the music played but at the same time they do like some repetition from week to week – I play a total of around 40 tracks each week. For this, I have a “Core Collection” of around 180 tracks – that’s it. I don’t need any more than that and sometimes it even feels like too much.

One of the main problems with being a beginner is that you do not (yet) have that core collection – you don’t have all those classics that people want to hear and you maybe don’t own the right kind of music to DJ from (that was the case with my collection when I started). So you need to go out and build that – but quality over quantity, every time. Pick your songs. Listen to them again the next day before you buy them. Be really picky 🙂

I add tracks as they come out (They like hearing the latest charts releases.. mostly) and as I find them, and I have a clear out every month or so, getting rid of songs I haven’t played recently.

On a less regular basis, I DJ for a slightly different crowd who like a completely different kind of music – and this involves 4hr sets every now and then. So I prepped twice that in tracks – 8hr’s worth, which is around 130 tracks. No more.

So I have a total core collection of around 300 tracks, and that is it – that lets me know every track really well. If I hear another DJ play a track that I also have in my collection, I know it’s name (and bpm) straight away… Or within the first few bars. That way I can DJ instinctively rather than going through pe-prepped lists of tracks that I don’t really know very well. The results are nearly always better when you know the tracks – and that happens with a smaller collection.

On a different note, however, I do have a much larger collection of tracks on my hard drive that I use for storing the rest of my music – tracks that might get requested, tracks I actually listen to etc. This is around 3700 tracks big, including the 300 in my other collection. This way I can deal with (nearly) any request that i get given. One DJ I know who has been doing the same job as me but for much longer has a much bigger collection – approx 26,000 tracks. But he has the same system and knows the ones he plays most commonly very well indeed.

Back to DJ Pools, I don’t use them. I use iTunes and (very occasionally) the artists offers the track I want as a free download. I still check for it on iTunes though. I don’t see the point in DJ pools – if you don’t have a request, say you’re sorry you don’t have it, write it down and buy the track when you get home – if you think it might be requested again or if you actually like it… 🙂

If you are looking for songs of a certain genre, there are several methods to find them.

One is to find a song you like from that genre on sound cloud. Look at the “Recommended Tracks” list. Have a listen.. Any good? Often they are similar and sometimes they are decent. This sometimes also works on YouTube or iTunes, but they aren’t as good.

Another is spotify – create a playlist of all the tracks you have in that genre, then click “play spotify radio” on the top of the playlist. It will then play a load of tracks that a similar to ones in your playlist but NOT the ones in your playlist. Stick it on whilst you are trying to do something else and write down the names of any tracks that some up that you like.

Hope this helps,

bob6397

And one very important thing:
You are a DJ not a beatbox. I would not pay a beatbox I can just use iTunes on Genius playlist, I would pay a DJ.

I think this whole issue has a lot of factors that need to be considered, and the answer will be different for each DJ. In a perfect world, I think we would all be playing one or two hour sets in a club or festival only playing the music we love. For me that is not realistic. As a mostly mobile DJ, I am expected to have every song under the sun. Obviously I don’t, but I try my best to have what I think the people might ask for, and learn the tracks I am unfamiliar with before my gigs. I am 35, and I DJ events for my peers. I feel like I need to have every (or most) popular, dancey top 40 track from the past 25 years so when I get a request I don’t get an eye roll and snarky comment when I am honest and say I don’t have the song (or the requestor is looking over my shoulder when I am searching and sees I don’t have it).

I belong to several record pools (three actually). I probably spend more on music than I should. But it also lets me feel more free with the music I select. I download based on three criteria…do I like the song, could this song be a possible request, or is it a song that I would be “expected” to have. Maybe I download song I like that I would never play out, but I might use it in a mixtape for myself or another who likes that genre. I belong to three because one has a huge variety (BPM Supreme) and has some latin tracks that I need for DJing in SoCal, a second (Beat Junkies) has a lot of old school hip hop and such that is hard to find, and a third (DJ City) which I am new to but I like their selection of remixes and edits. Now there is some overlap between the three, but this way I feel like I am not missing anything. I used to belong to another (mymp3pool) that has a lot of DJ-centric edits (Hype or Acapella intros/outros, scratch tools, etc) but I canceled in favor of DJ City to see how that goes. Plus I like the other features of their website so I want to support their efforts.

The iTunes thing for individual tracks would probably work for the Latin tracks (regional Mexican to Reggaeton to Tribal, etc), but BPM Supreme does a decent enough job that I leave it at that. BPM Supreme does put out some Reggae tracks (maybe 10 or so a month, maybe less) so I don’t know if that is enough for your needs, Kai.

The 10 tracks per month thing is good when you have your established base collection, but when you are first starting out that won’t get it done!

I saw a video of Laidback Luke talking about something similar and he says as DJs we should play “2 for them and 1 for us.” I like that mantra. If I can play a commercial track that is a request and mix into or out of it in a creative way to a song I like that maybe my crowd doesn’t know, I usually get a good reaction. “Civilians” sometimes just want us to be a beatbox, but it is up to us to show them better than that.

Holy crap this is way longer than I intended it to be.

Hi folks,

Let me pitch in here a bit. I do remember what it was going out to play live for the first time (even though it was an awfully long time ago – 38 years to be precise). Clearly things were different. If you had music/records then you were slightly ahead of the curve of most of your classmates. And if you had the gear (however shoddy and thrown together) to play back to back records (I dare not care calling it mixing, let alone beat matching), you pretty much had it made.

We started because a few kids loved music, spent their sparse money on 7″ singles, copied whatever we could from friends onto tapes and threw in the odd records we inherited from parents and family. And then … one day … we offered to “do” the music at a class function. It was, to any modern standard, a total disaster, with one thing saving our skin, we played the few tracks we DID have in more or less the right order, leaving everyone having a great evening and us feeling like kings :-).

Yes, the world has changed, expectations of the crowd have changed. Everyone knows you can download any track you want immediately on your smartphone, so not having a request has become somewhat of a no-no, simply because no one has a clue what goes into DJ-ing in the first place. After all, everybody does it, right?!

In another post, and subsequent blog article, the question was “how do I know I am ready to play out?”. Having your music collection up to par is one of the criteria in my book. And if you decide you are ready to play out with what you have, be ready to do just that, work with what you have. It is, in my book, a really bad move to just drag something you haven’t heard before with unknown origin/source and quality from a DJ pool, iTunes, whatever and play it, just because it was requested. I have a LOT of tracks for requests (mobile DJ too), but if it’s not in there, it’s not in there. I do NOT go online from my phone to download a track. It’s like someone handing you a record in a disco and asking you to play it. You wouldn’t right? You’d have no idea of the type of song, the song structure, the quality of the vinyl, where/how the music would fit in your set. And you sure wouldn’t want to spend 15 minutes listening to the track a few times in your headphones to find out.

There is something inherently wrong with being a DJ if you can’t make the evening work with just the music you brought. Today more so than back in the day. With 10s of millions of tracks available to everyone with just a mouse-click, it is totally impossible to know, let alone HAVE every track that could possibly be requested. Sure, any streaming service could help in that respect, but it would mean foregoing all the preparation and precaution that is so wise to take before allowing something into your collection and/or into your set.

And yes, in the early days you will need to buy a bit more than 10 tracks a month. But the same “rules” apply. Buy what YOU think is gonna work for your kind of DJ-ing and only buy it after you are 200% sure it’s a track you are gonna be using often in your sets because it’s that good. Don’t go off trying to fill your request bucket asap. Sure, if the person booking you has one or two favorite songs, I’d be getting those IN ADVANCE and prepping them properly. Still they would not be in my primary collection, just in the requests section (which for me is a separate hard disk with tracks not run through my DJ software).

So, if you feel you are ready to play out, feel ready to play out with what you have by way of collection. Learn what you are missing (in general, not specific tracks!) and act on that. Let’s say you find out that the requests you get are in a general genre that you don’t have or don’t have enough of. You now know that to increase your effectiveness and success, that you have to start looking into that genre and very picky start choosing tracks in that genre to add to your collection. In the process you will start to learn about the general characteristics of that genre, some of it’s main artists, some of it’s biggest hits (best of charts are always a great place to start looking for stuff in genres you are not familiar with). And you will be able to add that genre to your sets on YOUR terms and with the tracks in that genre that you like to have. Sure in most cases you’ll need a lot of the commercial stuff, but as said, you can mix that with the educating portion of being a DJ by throwing in stuff you recently discovered that the crowd might not know (yet).

My personal experience with requests is that they are one a party, meaning that the request I get at one party is not coming back again in the future, because if it is such a popular song that it gets requested two-three gigs in a row, I will have picked up on it and considered it for my collection. So collecting requests is just gonna grow a big pile of music that you will most likely never be asked for again. And that is money spent better on your primary tracks, imho.

I understand the problem you have being deployed and not having proper access to stuff. So all you can do is listen and write down the tracks you want to buy for your collection when you get back to civilization (and listen to them once more, you may find they lost their luster in the meantime). And meantime you make do with what you have. And if what you have is not sufficient to play out with, then perhaps you are not quite ready yet. Although being were you are, meaning most people will be in the same place as non-access to music is concerned and I am gonna be guessing they rather have a DJ with some music than no DJ at all.

So, keep up the spirit. Nobody is trying to put you or your efforts down.

On the side note, the advantages of signing into the DJ Pools is you can get (sometimes) cheaper tunes than other places, for example Beatport,

Example, “The Hum” listed at Beatport at $1.99, DJ Pool $1.33, its cheaper because usually you pay monthly for them DJ Pools

PS: Check out DMS, Direct Music Service, they have their own dedicated “Reggae” section, sometimes with today’s top 40 Reggae Mix, not sure if that’s the kind of reggae you looking for but you can still preview the tunes in there