Hi Andrew,
Building a good collection is one of the most difficult things to do for a DJ. In the old days money was the limiting factor. Unless you had unlimited funds, space and some young helpers to carry all your vinyl around, you would be VERY picky in what you bought. Building your collection to a good working number would take a while.
Today the opposite is true, there is so much music available for low prices (1-2 bucks a track) and even free, which makes it a real challenge to NOT download everything you can get your hands on.
There are all kinds of DJs. Club DJs will generally play a wider range of current dance music, including some of what is often referred to as “commercial”, “pop” or “chart” music. Clearly this depends on the club. Some clubs are very genre-specific in which case the DJ has to stick to that genre. Underground clubs on the other hand often expect you play unknown stuff that you had to search hard for.
Mobile DJs are the “can play anything” brothers and sisters among us. Usually they will have a wide collection of tracks in every thinkable genre, including stuff like foxtrot, chachacha, salsa, rock n roll and every Top 40 hit ever produced.
But even they will have a relatively limited core collection that makes up the fabric of their gigs.
It all depends on what you want to do/be. Whatever it is you choose, we suggest keeping a very tight rule on your collection. Somewhere around 500-600 tracks can already be plenty for your purpose. By being picky, you will only let the tracks in that really appeal to you AND that you feel will go well with a number of other tracks in your collection. Those tracks you put together in mini-playlist (3-4 tracks). With a limited number of tracks like this, you can make sure they are all correctly prepped, tracked, labelled, etx and you can make sure you know them intimately. You will know by heart what the song structure for each track is, where the breaks are, where the vocals kick in, what the fade-in/fade-out looks like.
With all that knowledge comes the peace of mind that you have all the music you need, know all the music you need and how to put that music together in a way that makes sense.
Hope that helps some.
.
