How do you do it? Obviously there is tons of music out there available via blogs or torrents, etc. And as someone who DJs as a hobby (though wouldn’t mind playing a paid gig somewhere), but is also a broke college student, how am I supposed to do it? I realize it’s a hobby, and like anything it costs money, but the fact is…it add’s up. At $2.49/track on Beatport it can be quite costly to even put together a single mix. How do other “poorer” DJs do this? I mean, if a track is available as a download on a blog, it’s still pirating…am I right? How do you deal with this moral dilemma? I mean, when I graduate college and have a job, and have money, I will buy every single track. Not just for playing out, but for home listen to. I mean what’s a guy supposed to do?
Record pools, stealing tracks off friends, buy smart. There are lots of compilations on beatport in which you can pick up 20+ tracks in one buy for around 70c a track.
Alot of artists give out some of their music for free. Here is one of my favorite free tunes. Also check out Mad Decent’s soundcloud page (its a record label run by Diplo), they have tons of free tunes on there too.
For the record, I spin mostly, if not exclusively EDM. In my own time, I spin anything, but for gigs I’ve done (unpaid that is, or on school radio) it’s EDM. Dubstep, trance, electro and progressive house, and dnb.
Checking out that A.Skillz remix. I dig it, but it’s not something I’d spin.
I’m looking at DJCity right now, and am wondering about this versus other pools.
So if a blog posts a track for download, can I legally play that as a DJ?
Check out iTunes, most large EDM labels have compilation albums. Example, Spinnin’ Records. You can buy a 25 track compilation from them on iTunes for 10$ while BP sells it for 25$. Digging for tunes this way is great and you’ll be surprised how much iTunes has to offer.
Lucky you are doing this now and not 10 years ago when it was $8-12 per track (and I was a poor student at one point) but if you really want to do it you’ll beg/steal/borrow to feed your habit much like any other art
Word of advice though is DONT look at getting 100 tracks a week just because you can, listen, select, listen select or you’ll just end up a mess of a music collection with tons of mediocre “filler” tracks that are “ok” - its worth spending the time, effort (and money) building up a really choice collection of tracks that won’t age in 2 or 10 years and buy the “big ones” occasionally as you need, but I’d be looking at perhaps getting a maximum of 25 tracks per week.
Oh also must stuff on Juno is $1.75 per track and (IMHO) they have a better selection and better categorization
I totally agree with this, when I started out tunes used to cost an absolute fortune, I remember having the same ten records for like ever just mixing them over and over, then at the end of the month when I got paid I went out and bought some new tracks I spent about £50 and got about 7 records, I done this every month. its cost me thousands over the years to build my collection but I appreciated every last track I had. Now there in my attic collecting dust but I would never get rid of them to many good memories.
Posted something related to this elsewhere on the forum; I’ve spent an absolute fortune on tunage (vinyl) since the early 90’s which I’m definitely not grumbling about, there was no alternative, but since switching to digital, it’s soooo much cheaper. I used to easily clear £70 a week on a bag of 10 records, now I’m lucky if I spend that in a month even paying $2.99 per track for promos on Traxsource. Never has it been so good IMHO and like previous posters would never sell my vinyl collection.
(i wont get into how i used to pay 11 bucks for import 12 inch singles and 7 bucks for domestics AND would have to order 50 dollars or more to get free shipping AND would have to wait for them in the mail AND hope none of them went out of stock…but i won’t get into that…)
(or drive down to melrose and spend the entire day digging for three maybe four records and three or four different shops…but like i said…i wont get into that)
