While enjoying the cathartic exercise of randomly digging through my neglected record collection (try it sometime — it’s amazing), I was reminded of a piece of work I did around the time of the launch of Stanton’s ground breaking SCS.4DJ all-in-one. At the time, it was commented at just how crippling the 20K track limit was, or words to that effect. Thus I was inspired to create the above image to give some context to just what 20,000 tracks actually looks like, and it seems ideal for a #throwbackthursday moment.
It’s always work revisiting this from time to time, and getting a gentle reminder of the things that have now become the norm. It still strikes me that much of this endless coveting is not so much about the creative needs of a DJ, but much more about the fear of being able to satisfy the most obscure of requests. It could however be argued now that this just-in-case scenario can be more adequately handled by more reliable downloading or streaming.
YOUR SAY
Do you still feel naked unless you have a server farm full of music plugged into your laptop? Or have you learned to manage with less than you thought? Is too much choice crippling?
Yeah that’s how much space,weight etc. 20K _physical_ tracks take up. 20K tracks on a hard drive however take up no more (physical) space than 1 track – so why not carry your entire library?
A 20K limit on a digital DJ playback system is a limitation, because so many of us have larger collections. Mine’s currently just under 42K, but there are guys out there who (claim to) have 100s of thousands!
So…..during a typical 4hr mobile gig, the DJ can play 80 three minute tracks. Is 80 all he needs to take then? Of course not.
Unless he’s under specific instruction from the client to only play 80 tracks they’ve named in advance, then who knows what he’ll get asked for on the night?
Think of how many genres there are. He should have a reasonable amount of each major genre, because he may need to play the entire gig of just that type of music. Maybe he’ll need 80 pop tracks, but maybe he’ll need 80 rock tracks……and so on.
Not being able to meet obscure requests doesn’t bother me, as I come from the vinyl days when you just had to say no – but even with my 42K library someone can ask me for a track, I assume I have it and discover a hole in my collection.
There is a huge difference between a succesfull and well known club/festival DJ and an unknown mobile or wedding DJ.
The club DJ usually plays a certain genre and a prepared set of lets say Techno or EDM so he certainly doesn’t need more than 1000 tracks at a gig.
However if you have a less succesful career as a wedding or a mobile DJ aka the “John Does” of the DJ world then you need to do requests maybe the parents want to hear ABBA so then whole families from 8 till 80 can be pleased lol.
Yes I know. I’ve been a club DJ in the past.
Even in recent years I’ve had a bar residency playing a (fairly) fixed style of music. I didn’t go through my hard drive and remove 41,000 tracks before each night though. There was no need. I just took the lot.
BTW your assumption/generalisation that if you’re a club DJ you’re successful but if you’re a wedding DJ you’re a failed nobody was the best laugh I’ve had all week!
sorry but if you think that a mobile DJ doesnt want to play what he wants at a club/festival before thousands of ppl rather than playing Lil Wayne as a middle aged man at a high school gig then you obvioulsly have no idea what it means to be succesful.
Also nobody really cares about your harddrive, the content can be erased in a matter of secs, i hope you got all your music for free, i wouldnt pay anything for a single digital file, its like paying for air we breath
Music is so disposal now because of this ability to simply amass or have access to. Your 42k library will be laughed at once streaming becomes mainstream and everyone will have access to millions of tracks online. And instead of a DJ taking the dancers on a musical journey with his/her music collection and tastes, it will become the dancers who pick and choose the music for the dance floor. This is no different than a jukebox found in a pub/bar where a quarter would get you a song of your choice. A DJ-less club will be in the near future.
thats good news because most DJs don’t deserve to get paid for what they do, if you want be a DJ then get busy work your ass off on stage rather than selecting disposable music and scratchin nothing but your nose
Doesn’t a full dance floor and subsequently busy bar determine if a DJ should get paid or not? And as for scratching — we all know that this is a kiss of death for the dance floor. Unless it’s a specific scratch artist doing a gig, there’s no love for a chin rubbing technical session beyond a few minutes for your average clubber.
of course but a bar can be full as well with a (digital) jukebox
I’ve got around 32000 tracks on my laptop but STILL find tracks every week that I want to add to my collection (mainly in other people’s mixes). Some of these files are short samples, instrumentals, acapellas, beats etc so not all tracks I’d put on the ipod.. If you have a wide taste in music and use all genres when putting mixes together as I do (including film clips) I maintain that you can almost never have too many. The problem is I don’t think I’ll ever be able to beatgrid/cue point/loop edit them all in a hundred years!
I used to have like 15k tracks on my dj library. One day after realising how much of that is either garbage or unplayable, I decied to listen to everything, rank it and label it, and reduced it to around 5k. I keep adding new cool tracks, and sometimes deleting tracks that didn’t quite work.
I think that you should separate your music library from your dj library. Music library can be infinite, but dj library should be music that you know well.
I spent a year doing that and it was so useful. My full music collection is around 22K or something, it grows REALLY fast, but my DJ collection is less than 4000. And in general I only probably actually select from a small chunk of that. It’s hard work, but totally worth it.
And this really is what it boils down to: a selected few that defines you as a DJ and your taste. Everything else is just “for listening”.
The challenge isn’t about how many tracks you should/could/may have in your library. It’s about managing that amount of tracks. Sure, if your main goal is to please every obscure request known to man, then perhaps you should bring the lot.
But if you’re doing a wedding with average Joes – then there’s no news. They all want to hear the same old songs over and over.
I retired from all form of wedding/anniversary/people who just listens to radio-gigs cause I couldn’t fool myself. I only play gigs where they want my kind of music. I’ll be honest – it ain’t often, but I love it everytime. Instead of getting abused by people with lousy taste requesting songs that are so played out you just wanna puke.
No one cares about the “crap tracks”, but lots of DJs collect everything (hoping they have a tune they haven’t heard when someone asks for it) when someone makes a request.
Have a bulk collection, but more importantly, have a DJ collection that you carefully curate.