Serato, Rekordbox, and Djay Pro have added Spotify as a streaming service to their platforms, bringing the world’s most popular music streaming service back to DJing for the first time in many years.
All these platforms now let you select Spotify among the current batch of streaming services, a lineup that includes Apple Music, Tidal, Beatport, Beatsource, and SoundCloud.
Once you’ve selected Spotify and logged into your premium account, you can view your whole Spotify library or drill down into individual playlists that you have on the service. There’s also a number of curated playlists that would be useful to DJs if you just want to get stuck in and start playing music.
DJing with Spotify – it’s back!
It’s hard to overstate how big a deal this is for beginner and casual DJs. Ever since Spotify disappeared from Algoriddim’s Djay Pro software many years ago, DJs have been clamouring for a way to use their Spotify playlists in DJ software. Until now, the solutions have been convoluted, involving converting playlists to other services, doubling up subscriptions, and so on.
Read this next: How To DJ With Spotify – 5 Ways To Do It In 2025
With all three platforms and Spotify working together natively, that whole area of resistance to people entering the DJ world has gone – they’ll just be able to log into their existing music collection and start DJing instantly.
What you need to know
There are a few things that more experienced DJs will want to know about this integration:
- You need Spotify Premium – Hopefully this will be obvious, but you can’t do this on the free version of Spotify. After all, you wouldn’t want audio ads playing in your DJ sets, would you?
- There’s no Stems – We tried, and in the current version, there’s no way of using the Stems function on your Spotify playlists in any platform
- There’s no offline locker – You’re going to be relying on the internet being steady if you want to DJ with Spotify in DJ software (at least for now)
- No word on other platforms – VirtualDJ users, Traktor users, Engine DJ and standalone Rekordbox…currently this isn’t available for you
How to do it in each platform
How to DJ with Spotify and Serato DJ
How to DJ with Spotify and Rekordbox
How to DJ with Spotify and Djay Pro
First Thoughts
Never mind the usual streaming limitations – this is massive for the laptop DJ crowd. For many of them, Spotify is their music collection. With a simple username and login, all that music is now available to you for discovery, DJ practice, and performance.
Whether used as a backup alongside your main music collection or for just having fun discovering new music exclusively within Spotify, this is going to be pretty cool – frankly, I’m sure if you use any of these DJ platforms and you’re also a heavy Spotify user, you’re already heading over there now to set it up!
However, it has to be said that this has come at a hard time for Spotify, with over 400 artists and counting (including Massive Attack) removing their music from the platform in protest of Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s military investments. Still, it’s there now – and if you don’t want to use Spotify, there’s still Apple Music in all these platforms nowadays, as an alternative.
- Take this further: Learn how to use your DJ software properly in our Serato Made Easy and Rekordbox Made Easy courses
Phil Morse
