How to organize your music library as a DJ

In this post, I'll show you how to organize your music library as a DJ. With many years of experience as a DJ and performances at various clubs across the country, I've developed a love for structure! You can either watch the video or read my post to get inspiration for organizing your own music library.Spotify and Playlists for Inspiration

Become an Excellent DJ

If you want to be an ambitious DJ with a well-organized music library or catalog, it's essential to know the music you play. Knowing just the BPM (beats per minute) and the key of your tracks isn't enough. While you can certainly go far as a DJ with knowledge of your catalog, even if it's not sorted by year and genre, having an overview of release dates and genres still makes life much easier. It will also provide you with a more informed approach to the music you should play, for example, at a 50th birthday party where the audience can range from 10 to 70 years old.

We all know the phrase "do you remember the music of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s," etc. These phrases have come about because of all the fantastic music that has been released over time. Going back 60 years, the 1960s were the years when Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones were huge hits. Rock and jazz were trendy, and young people met and partied at so-called jazz clubs.

The evolution of music continued as the years went by, and in the 1970s, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire, and, among others, Gasolin' with Kim Larsen were the names seen on music posters plastered on every surface in the streets. Disco, Funk, Soul, and R&B were prominent in these years, and together with the 1980s, a pattern of colorful parties, clothing, and lifestyle began to emerge.

 

Spotify and playlist for inspiration

Every single day, 60,000 songs are released on the Spotify platform alone. It takes a lot of time to get insight and control over all the new music that is released and can be used for various events. Spotify has its own playlists and they are a really good starting point if you, for example, want to keep up with the most popular new mainstream music. Among others, there's Top 50 – Global and New Music Friday, which are really good for this purpose.

Even though Spotify doesn't have all sorts of special edits, remixes, and mashups like you find on platforms such as Soundcloud, 1001Tracklists, YouTube, or a third-party site, they have a plethora of official playlists created by Spotify itself, as well as playlists created by other private users. These playlists can make life easier for you as a DJ, develop your music catalog, and, most importantly, make you wiser about the evolution over the years.

You may have heard a DJ play a track within the subgenre disco-house, and then thought you'd like to play something similar next time you have a DJ gig. This is where playlists come into play, as on the day you can open Spotify and then find the latest hits in 2023 within the genre.

Soundcloud is also among the largest in the world, where you can find a lot of free music. There are especially many upcoming artists who want to promote themselves, often getting support through hyperlinks if other DJs want to download a remix the artist has made.

Purchasing Music

It's quick, simple, and easy to get inspiration from Spotify and then purchase the music on iTunes, Beatport, or other external sites where you can buy individual tracks, EPs, or albums. However, it can be expensive to pay 6-20 kr. for each track, which is why there are also many different music pools out there that offer most music with intro edits on the tracks. The most popular music pools are

	Monthly	Quarterly	Semi-annually	Annually
DjCity	€30		€150
MyMP3Pool	€20			€200
BPMSupreme	€20
DigitalMusicPool		€55	€110	€200
DigitalDJPool	€20			€190
Crooklyn Clan

At BPMSupreme, there are standard and premium plans. They range in price from $20 to $60, but you can easily settle for the standard plan at $20. DigitalDJPool offers a service called a 5-day trial for $1, where you can preview the music they offer. This is quite handy, as one is always curious to know if the music is good before paying the subscription fee.

Crooklyn Clan offers credit-based payment. This means you can purchase credits ranging from $2.50 to $90.00. They mostly offer a variety of mashups, bootlegs, and edits created by other DJs. The same goes for other sites, but the main concept at Crooklyn Clan is mashups and various edits designed for DJs as a package solution.

Setting Up Playlists in iTunes

As mentioned earlier, there are numerous ways to organize your music catalog. We will explain how to use iTunes for playlists and then synchronize those playlists with DJ software like Rekordbox. When you open iTunes and move the mouse down to the playlists tab, you can right-click underneath and use three functions. You can either create a playlist, a smart playlist, or a playlist folder.

The new playlist and playlist folder functions are straightforward. When you create a new playlist, for example, you can name it HipHop 2000s and then add all the music you think falls under that category. Implicitly, all hip-hop from the 00s was released from 2000 to 2009

Then you can add a "playlist folder" and place your created playlists inside. An example with the genre Hip Hop from 2010-2019 could look like this

The third function is "smart playlist." This is quite ingenious if the information for the individual songs is correctly set.

You can find the information by right-clicking on the track and selecting Show info.

Usually, music purchased on iTunes is provided with all correct data, allowing you to use smart playlists to filter with certain rules so that all music you have tagged under the integrated iTunes genre "HipHop/Rap" in the years from 2010-2019 is automatically added to the folder when the criteria are set and saved.

However, it should be remembered that it is set up according to the genres offered by iTunes. That means, for example, that it is difficult to separate Danish hip-hop from English hip-hop, as these criteria are not integrated into iTunes' backend system. Therefore, it is much easier to create the playlists manually to ensure that you can keep the two criteria separate.

NOTE: This smart playlist function ONLY works if you have set the criteria for each song under "Show info." 

Importing Playlists into RekordBox

Once you have created all your playlists and collected all the music in iTunes, you can start importing the playlists into your RekordBox. As shown in the figure below, you can update your iTunes library within RekordBox and then push the playlists up into RekordBox, so the songs from the playlist begin to sync and analyze, and voila, you have order and control over your music library.

Smartlist in Traktor PRO 3

If you are using the latest generation of DJ software, Traktor PRO 3, in your DJ setup, the same functionality exists as in iTunes. This is called Smartlist by Native Instruments.

Since the function is built-in, the whole process of creating smart playlists becomes even easier and can therefore also be done easily when you are playing live if you suddenly get a good idea for some tracks.

The Smartlist function in Traktor is very similar to the one built into iTunes but allows filtering on a range of other parameters, such as key and remixer. This gives you some more relevant parameters than iTunes offers. The list of parameters in iTunes vs. Traktor is as follows.

Comparison of Smartlist Function: iTunes vs. Traktor

Traktor PRO 3	iTunes
Analysis Lock
Analyzed
Color
Comment 2
Content type
File Availability
File Name
File Path
Import date
Key
Key Text
Label
Lyrics
Media Source
Mix
Played this Session
Release Date
Remixer
Rating	Rating
Title	Title
Time	Time
Catalog No.	Track No.
Last Played Date	Lat played date
Bitrate	Bitrate
Artist	Artist
Producer	Producer
Comment 1	Comment 1
Genre	Genre
BPM	BPM
Release	Release
Play Count	Play Count
	Year
	Modification date
	Work
	Rating of Video
	Choice
	Type
	Added date
	Size
	Status of liked Album
	Status for Like
	Status for Cloud
	Sorting Artist
	Sorting Producer
	Sorting Album Artist
	Sorting Album
	Last skipped
	Collection
	Playlist
	Placement
	Skips
	Number of Piece
	Name of Piece
	Mediatype
	Bought
	Category
	Group
	Disc Number
	Bit speed
	Description
	Album rating
	Album artist
	Album picture

How to create a Smartlist in Traktor PRO 3, follow these steps:

1. Create Smartlist:
   • In the menu to the left, next to the track overview, right-click on "Create Smartlist".

2.    Select parameters to filter on:In the list, you will find a variety of filtering options that can be used to narrow down exactly the type of music you are looking for.

3.    Give your playlist a name

To keep track of which playlists contain what, it's a good idea to name your playlist very precisely based on the music it contains. Also, keep an eye on the number of matches in the bottom left corner to ensure that there are tracks that match your criteria.

Example: dinner-playlist

Here's an example of a playlist you could use to find songs to play before the party starts while people are seated and eating.

In this playlist, we want music that is not too high-tempo, so there's an upper limit set on BPM at 110. We also want the music to be of high quality (over 319 in bitrate) and we don't want to play dance/house tracks. Finally, we set a limit that the music should have been released within the last 400 months (approximately 33 years).

 

- Belmin Kuburas & Rasmus Kruse - SoundStoreXL