I mean with almost everything having gone digital my local record shop has closed up shop and the nearest one is a good hour drive. I look at the charts on beatport and other websites but most of the stuff is just what you’d expect the top 10 is all the played to death stuff that everyone already has and the artist’s top 10 is mostly whatever lastest tracks they have op on that particular site. I sometimes read different blogs (doing so has lead me to this wonderful wonderful site) but that’s alot of the same.
So I ask all my fellow Techtools members. In the digital age how do you go about digging for that rare gem that time forgot, or that banging tune that never had a chance over the over produced garbage.
I have subscriptions to promo pools and also get stuff to download via email links. I regularly use Beatport, Juno Downloads, and rarely Audio Jelly (in rare instances Im curious about trance). Digging around Soundcloud is also fun to do, and yields interesting work.
-When I hear a sick ass track ive never heard before, I run up to the booth (not in an a-hole way since im a club regular), text myself the track, and continue dancing. then serach for it later. Doing so has helped me find this beautiful remix (note, i hate the original):
I work in a room alone all day, so once every 2-3 days I queue up the new stuff at Beatport & Trackitdown and let it play in the background. If it’s something I like, I stick it in the cart. Note that my hit ratio is about 2 tracks per couple days… and there’s like 200 a day to sort through.
Yeah a lot of the time I’ll just play videos by artists I know in youtube and see what pops up in the sidebar. Also on Itunes, the little part that says “you may also be interested in” or “people who purchased this also purchased…”
I check blogs and if I hear something I like I’ll buy it. The genius bar in itunes some. YouTube some. I listen to the new stuff on Beatport, Juno, Traxsource, etc..
I use Beatport, search through music forums such as glitchhopforum.com and I’m also subscribed to about 5 blogs organized through Google Reader. This gives me about 50+ new posts every week to read through and though lots of it is you can still find some gems.
I’m sure I’m going to get crucified for this, but this is how I do it.
I log on to my music torrent site and download all the torrents under their house and techno genres, download all the music and then sit down and sort through them. That’s about 3500-5000 tunes a week and to be honest a lot of it is garbage that just gets deleted.
Now, after I sort through them and I look at what I have actually saved, and if there’s an artists name that pops up a lot I go to beatport and put them on "my Beatport so I can keep up to date on their releases and buy them right away.
So basically I use my torrent sites to find new artists, and then use beatport to keep me up to date on those artists.
Using this method I have discovered a lot of artists/tracks I never would have found on my own as I’ve never seen or heard any one else play these artists/tunes or even know about them for that matter.
I actually do something very similar but go one step further. After adding the artist to beatport I then check every label the artist has produced for and then check out each artist I can find under that same label. Before you know it there are artist you have never heard before and labels you tend to stick with.
As for the torrent thing well it is what it is. I have found that the quality on torrents is typically around 128k and thats just not good enough for playing. So if I like an artist/track I usually end up buying it.
Also sorry for misspelling the title with Hoe meant to say How I wrote this at like 4 am and was very tired but thank you all for all the great ideas on how to discover new artists. If only I could do all these things with like 10 of my friends doing there with me being able to go ohh man that’s hot but listen to this… man I miss the record store vibe
