While we regularly knock SoundCloud for its draconian takedowns and general DJ unfriendliness, it’s still a great place for discovering music. And I discovered this cool trick that makes finding remixes/bootlegs easier on SoundCloud in your specific genre of music much easier. If you have some spare time this holiday weekend, why not give it a go?
How to do it
1. Start by doing a regular search. So if you search for “Michael Jackson” you will arrive at this page:
https://soundcloud.com/search?q=michael%20jackson
2. Click on “tracks” at the left-hand side. The URL will now become this:
https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds?q=michael%20jackson
Now comes the smart part. It would take ages to filter through this list as most of the results are pop or house remixes. At the bottom left there is the option to “Filter by tag”. Sometimes this will have your genre of music in it, sometimes not. However, there is a workaround:
3. Simply add the following to the end of the URL in your browser:
&filter.genre_or_tag=
…where is your genre of music. For example:
https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds?q=michael%20jackson&filter.genre_or_tag=trance
would find all the Michael Jackson tracks which have a “trance” tag on them.
This makes it much easier to find tracks in your specific genre of music, especially if you’re looking for a less popular genre.
Note that some people like to add lots of tags to their track and this may cause some of the results to be inaccurate. However, from the tests I’ve done it works pretty consistently well.
• Mark Webster is a Digital DJ Tips VIP member and this first appeared in the Digital DJ Tip Platinum Group on Facebook. Here’s his website.
Got any SoundCloud tips you’d like to share with us? Let us know in the comments!
Mark Webster
