Well, you will not find any help here when it comes to finding ways to get “free” commercial or otherwise pirated tunes. Period.
There are some platforms and way to find tracks for free, because that is the way the artist/label distributes them and some posts on these forums have been made in the recent past about that topic. The search option is your friend. Clearly this will not be mainstream stuff, but can contain some very interesting tracks. Unless you are very underground, I don’t think this will allow you to build up a full collection of playing out in public though.
We live in a world where the price per track is down to 1 euro/dollar a track in sufficient quality to use publicly. Gone are the days of having to buy albums, even if you like only one or two tracks, for prices from 20 to 30 euro an album.
If you start playing in public for larger crowds, you should either have the money to pay for your hobby or make money for doing your job. In the latter case, a single gig will play for a large part of your collection.
We are also advocates here of highly efficient libraries, this means only having in your library those tracks you know you will play regularly. Being on a tight budget will help you turn every potential track around 10 times before committing money to it. And once in your collection you will treat it like the gem it is.
DJ Pools seem like good alternatives. 10 to 20 euro a month can give you access to a large amount of music. That said, it’s repetitive costs and once your collection is up to speed, you probably won’t be buying that many tracks each month.
DJ-ing, while infinitely much cheaper to get into than in the “good ole days”, is still not free. Nor is it a human right to be able to DJ. Digital DJ-ing requires a laptop and a controller, headphones, possibly a microphone. Together well worth a minimum of 500 euro or more. But as you have noticed, you do need to buy music too.
We advise new DJs to start building their collection from day one. If it takes you a year to get ready to play out and you spend 15 euro a month on tracks, you will have a collection of around 200 tracks. Picked carefully those 200 tracks will allow you to easily play a 4-hour gig.
As you said, ripped internet versions of tracks sound so bad on bigger systems that you will not endear those giving you a chance to play on their system/in their venue.
I’d do some searches on these forums and read up on recent threads on the topic of library building, music discovery and track sourcing.
Hope that helps some.
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