How to organise your music library as a DJ

In this post, I will show you how to organise your music library as a DJ. I have been a DJ for many years and played at various clubs across the country, and I love structure! Watch the video or read my post and get inspiration for your music library.

Become an outstanding DJ

If you want to be an ambitious DJ with a well-organised music library or music catalogue, it is essential to know the music you play. It is not enough just to be familiar with BPM (beats per minute) and the key of your track. Of course, you can get far as a DJ if you know your catalogue, even if you don’t have it split by year and genre, but it still makes life much easier to have an overview of the release date and genre of your tracks. It will also give you a clearer solution for what music you should play for, for example, a 50th birthday, where the audience can vary from 10–70 years old. 

We all know the expression “do you remember the music in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s”, etc. These expressions came about because of all the fantastic music that has been released over time. If we go 60 years back, the 1960s were the years when Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were a huge hit. Rock and jazz were in vogue, and young people met up 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 you saw on music posters that were 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 colourful parties, clothing and lifestyle began to emerge. 
 

 

Spotify and playlists for inspiration

Every single day, 60,000 songs are released on the Spotify platform alone. It takes a lot of time to gain insight into—and keep track of—all the new music being released, which can also be used for various events. Spotify has its own playlists, and they are a really good starting point if, for example, you want to keep up with the most popular new mainstream music. This includes Top 50 – Denmark and New Music Friday, which are both really good for this purpose.

Even though Spotify doesn’t have all the special edits, remixes and mashups you can find on, for example, Soundcloud, 1001Tracklists, YouTube or a third site, they do have a huge number of official playlists created by Spotify itself, as well as playlists made by other private users. These playlists can make life easier for you as a DJ, expand your music catalogue and not least make you more aware of how things have developed over the years.

You may have heard a DJ play a track within the subgenre disco-house and then thought that you’d like to play something in that style yourself next time you have a DJ gig. This is where playlists come into the picture, because 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 also download a lot of free music. There are especially many upcoming artists who want to promote themselves, and in return they typically get support via a hyperlink if other DJ’s want to download a remix the artist has made.

 

Buying music

It’s quick, simple and easy to get inspiration from Spotify and then buy the music on iTunes, Beatport or other external sites where you can buy single tracks, EPs or albums. However, it can get expensive to pay 6-20 DKK for each individual track, which is why there are also a ton of 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 (208 DKK)		$150 (1040 DKK)
MyMP3Pool	$20 (139 DKK)			$200 (1387 DKK)
BPMSupreme	$20 (139 DKK)
DigitalMusicPool		$55 (381 DKK)	$110 (763 DKK)	$200 (1387 DKK)
DigitalDJPool	$20 (139 DKK)			$190 (1320 DKK)
Crooklyn Clan

Inside BPMSupreme there are standard and premium plans. They are in the price ranges $20-$60, but you can easily stick with the standard plan for $20. DigitalDJPool offers a service called a 5-day trial period for $1, where you can see and listen to what music they offer. This is pretty smart, since you’re naturally always curious to know whether the music is good before you pay the subscription price.

Crooklyn Clan offers credit payments. This means you can buy credit from them from $2.50-$90.00. For the most part, they also offer lots of different mashups, bootlegs and edits made by other DJ’s. The other sites do the same, but the main concept of Crooklyn Clan is mashups and various edits made for the DJ as a bundled package solution. 

 

Setting up playlists in iTunes

As mentioned earlier, there are loads of possibilities for how you can set up your music catalogue. We’ll explain how to use iTunes for playlists and then sync the playlists with the DJ software Rekordbox. When you open iTunes and move your mouse down to the Playlists tab, you can right-click and use three functions. You can create either a playlist, a smart playlist, or a playlist folder. 

The New Playlist and Playlist Folder function is simple to understand. When you create a new playlist, you can, for example, name it HipHop 2000s and then add all the music you think belongs in this category. In other words, all hip hop from the 2000s was released from 2000 to 2009.

Next, you can add a “playlist folder” and put your created playlists into it. An example with the genre Hip Hop from 2010-2019 could look like this

The third function is “smart playlist”. This is quite brilliant if the information for each song is set correctly. 

You can find the information by right-clicking the track and selecting Get Info.

Normally, music tracks purchased on iTunes are provided with all correct data, and this gives you the advantage that, with smart playlists, you can narrow things down with certain rules so that all music you’ve assigned to the built-in iTunes genre “HipHop/Rap” in the years 2010-2019 is automatically added to the folder once the criteria are set and saved. 

However, you should bear in mind that it’s set up according to the genres iTunes offers. This means, for example, that it’s difficult to separate Danish hip hop from English hip hop, as these criteria aren’t integrated into the iTunes back-end system. In that case, it’s much easier to create the playlists manually, so you can be sure you can keep the two criteria separate. 

NOTE. This smart playlist function works ONLY if you have set the criteria for each track under “Get Info”. 
 

Importing playlists into Rekordbox

Once you’ve created all your playlists and gathered all your music in iTunes, you can start importing the playlists into your Rekordbox. As shown in the figure below, you can update your iTunes library inside Rekordbox and then push the playlists into Rekordbox, so the tracks from the playlist start syncing and analysing—and voilà, you’ve got order and control over your music library. 

Smartlists in Traktor PRO 3

If you use the latest generation of Traktor software, Traktor PRO 3, in your DJ setup, the same functionality exists as in iTunes. Native Instruments calls this Smartlist.

Since the function is built in, the whole process of creating smart playlists becomes even easier, and can therefore also easily be done while 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 makes it possible to filter by a range of other parameters, such as key and remixer. This gives you more relevant parameters than iTunes offers. You can find the list of parameters in iTunes vs. Traktor below.

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 number
Last Played Date	Last played
Bitrate	Sampling rate
Artist	Artist
Producer	Composer
Comment 1	Comments
Genre	Genre
BPM	BPM
Release	Album
Play Count	Plays
	Year
	Date modified
	Work
	Video rating
	Selected
	Type
	Date added
	Size
	Album Like status
	Like status
	Cloud status
	Sort artist
	Sort composer
	Sort album artist
	Sort album
	Last skipped
	Collection
	Playlist
	Location
	Skips
	Movement number
	Movement name
	Media type
	Purchased
	Category
	Grouping
	Disc number
	Bit rate
	Description
	Album rating
	Album artist
	Album artwork

How to create a Smartlist in Traktor PRO 3

1. Create Smartlist
In the menu on the left, next to the track overview, right-click on “Create Smartlist”.

2. Select parameters to filter by
In the list you will find all kinds of filtering options that can be used to narrow down exactly the type of music you are looking for.

3. Give your list a name
To keep track of which playlists contain what, it is a good idea to name your playlist very precisely according to what music is in it. Also keep an eye on the number of matches in the bottom left corner, so you are sure there are tracks that match your criteria.

Example dinner playlist

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

Here we would like music that is not too fast, so an upper limit of 110 BPM has been set. We also want the music to be high quality (over 319 in bitrate) and that no dance / house is played. Finally, a limit is set that the music must have been released within the last 400 months (approx. 33 years).

 

- Belmin Kuburas & Rasmus Kruse - SoundStoreXL