Spotify Djing

Simply said: No.
WHen you play spotify in public you are breaking the End User Agreement with Spotify and probably the law of your country. So it is illegal to do this.
The function for example in djay that lets you DJ with spotify is only meant for home training purpose (you by yourself).

As Terry said, you are ok to use it at home for practice. Anything else you should be buying your tracks.

Now, while I may not be 13 anymore and it’s been a while since I was, I do recall having an allowance. And I am guessing allowances have gone up (inflation and all that) over the last 40 years.

Good DJs listen to a LOT of music, but buy only a LITTLE number of tracks (5-10 per month!). I am pretty sure that you have accumulated quite a few CDs over the last years of music you like. Those you can rip to WAV, Flac or MP3 and use of course. From now on you should only pick the absolute best tracks you hear, listen to them for at least a few more times on different systems and in different environments like your bedroom DJ set, on your phone while on the bus to schoool, at a friends home stereo set. And only when you are absolutely sure that you need that track in your permanent collection do you go and buy it at iTunes, Beatport Pro or any of the other online places to buy music. It should cost you no more than 5-15 bucks a month. If your allowance doesn’t cover it, doing the neighbours lawn once a month should 😀 .

Basically what we are saying is you can start behaving like a professional DJ today at the age of 13 by at least purchasing your tracks legally. And by the time you are 18 or 20 and get discovered, you can be the guy that can stand up proudly and say that he has always supported the artists whose music helped you become the DJ you are then.

Good luck m8

There you go!

Yep, and what they are doing is a) illegal and b) not fair to the artists.

We are not saying you can’t, just that you shouldn’t.

Yeah. And once your collection is ready to play out (couple of hundred tracks), your monthly intake should really not be much more than 4-10 tracks a month (10 already being pretty much imho). You need to pick only the gems to avoid that your collection grows too much or you enter stuff with a rather short shelf life, thus contaminating your collection.

And as soon as your collection has reached a level you predetermined (Phil for example has about 600 tracks), you can start taking one track out for every new track entering. This will make you very picky about what to enter and every time you enter one you are forced to consider what track needs to go. Slowly but surely, over time, your collection will be hard hits only.

And hits in this case has nothing to do with charts, but with tracks that you know will work very well with your audiences and that you like to use.

At the end of the day, even at 2-3 bucks a wav at Beatport, monthly spending is around 8 to 30 bucks a month. Even if you don’t make (much) money DJ-ing, that is the kind of money you should be able to save for music somehow (the first 10 bucks a month is not getting Spotify Premium!).

Music discovery, including the free stuff, is one of the main talents of a good DJ!