Do You Really Need A Huge Music Library ?

Whether you learn DJ’ing all by yourself or take classes and courses, one thing does not change. You are told to grab every piece of music you get and save it in your archive at some point. Larger it is, better DJ you are..

Is the above statement true ? Do you really need to stuff your hard disks up with thousands of tracks ? Will you need all of them ?

The answer is no, no ,no ! You don’t and you can’t.

Music was easy to understand, harder to collect and more expensive in the past. You had to wait for the good ones to be in your hands. Hard copies were the king, so was the sound quality.

Today, with the ease of a single subscription and few clicks, you get to download much more than you ever need. Zillion remix versions of the same track, genre in genre, too many sources and platforms for music that you can’t even follow up.

Eventually, you drawn in it. You get so much lost in the crowd of unnecessary tunes and literally need a flash light to find your way out.

Folks, let me tell you this, I stopped inflating my DJ music library at a little over ten thousand tracks. It’s still too much, I know.

Knowing that you can’t really play more than 150 songs per gig, how large do you think your DJ archive should be ? Just answer this question to yourself.

Besides all of these, I suppose you have your own music style as a DJ, right ? What is it ? House, trance, hip hop, latin ?

As a DJ in the EDM scene, how many times a year would you play hip hop ? Or salsa ?

Ok, let’s skip the question part and continue to the facts and advice session. I’ll give you some examples.

What I Did (Wrong)

I have one popular song from a known artist in my DJ music library. In addition to that, I get 5 different remix versions of the same track. I never play the original version and spin only one remix of it that I like most. The rest is garbage to me, unfortunately. But they still occupy space in my hard drive.

Now, multiply this “One original + 5 Remix versions” situation with hundreds, even thousands of single tracks.

Let’s talk about what I do during a gig. I start digging into that giant mass and try to find that one remix that I like, or save it in a playlist with all the other “favorite” ones. Making those playlists is another time-consuming task, of course.

Years pass and I browse thru my archive from time to time. I realize that there are so many of them I never ever played, even once. I ask myself, ” What the hell was I thinking when I paid for this track ?”. Yeap, I said it a lot.

My Advice To You

If you really wanna collect tunes just to have them in your library, my advice is go for the oldies or the real known, legendary songs. The ones without an expiration date on it. Don’t just download multiple versions of a new song because it is popular now but will fade away soon.

A good DJ does not say this, “Let me have it, just in case”. Do yourself a favor and don’t turn your music collection into a monster. Get only what you need.

Last updated by Murat Celikbas on February 3, 2015.