Online record pools and legal music download sites have replaced the record shop as the de facto source for music, but we’d like to know exactly where you buy your tunes from? Are you part of a service like Promo Only? Do you spend a lot of time on sites like Beatport or Traxsource digging for your next secret banger?
I’ll kick things off: I do most of my music downloads via the iTunes Store. I noticed that prices for tracks here are way cheaper compared to Beatport (in my region, singles usually come out at just US$0.69 a pop), so that’s my first stop. If what I’m looking for isn’t there, that’s when I do a search on Beatport. I also check Beatport whenever I’m looking for Stems versions of tracks that I want to buy.
If I’m looking for a special version of a song, say an edit of a Top 40 track with an eight bar intro, I head to Promo Only as I’m a subscriber to the record pool. It always has multiple versions of chart toppers especially for hip-hop, and it’s where I get a lot of my transition remixes (eg a song that starts off at 100BPM then drops to 75BPM). Once I have the tracks I want, I import them into iTunes for inclusion in my DJ library – that’s my usual music shopping procedure.
Speaking of downloads, we’re having a webinar this coming Thursday (2 June) on the future of music downloads for DJs – with streaming fast becoming the mainstream way of consuming music, will MP3 downloads be a thing of the past? If so, how will that affect us DJs who keep our own music libraries on our hard drives? If you’re a Digital DJ Tips subscriber you’ll get an e-mail where you can reserve a slot, otherwise you can register here.
So over to you: Where do you get your music from these days? Which record pools are you a subscriber of, if any? Do you swear by Beatport and Tracksource, or are you satisfied with iTunes? Let us know below.
Joey Santos
