Groovepunk

Thanks. I enjoyed that!

Clean mixes, great tracklist and nice energy throughout.

Good job mate 🙂

GP

The only site with a mechanism for monetising DJ mixes that I know of is Beatport. One (significant) limitation is that you can only use tracks purchased on their site.

I can’t imagine there’s much money to be made from selling mixes these days when even the most famous DJs give away mixes for free. I suspect only some sort of exclusivity or association to special event would make people spend money on a mix.

It’s not like the good old days of mixtapes/mix CDs and no broadband!

The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away eh? 🙂

GP

Sure. I’ll play!

My page: https://www.facebook.com/GroovePunk

Now to do some serious ‘liking’…

GP

This has been a really interesting debate to follow!

I totally agree that knowing what tracks a DJ plays doesn’t allow you to replicate their performance. A DJ is much more than a tracklist or a piece of equipment.

Saying that, I can understand why DJs can be protective of their tracks. Curation is one of the DJs greatest (and most time-consuming) skills and it can be frustrating to think that someone might bypass all of that, particularly when it’s so easy to Google or Shazam a track.

Ultimately I think it’s contextual. If someone comes up to you at a gig and asks for a track name, you’re under no obligation to tell them. Posting mixes online is quite different though as providing a tracklist is often the way that sites are able to host your mix in the first place. Mixcloud and Soundcloud are prime examples of this. I see many complaints online from people who’ve had mixes pulled from Soundcloud on copyright grounds and it’s very annoying. As you know, Mixcloud gets around this by paying a royalty to the artist – which I’m all for. Plus I’m really happy to support artists by advertising their tracks for them (don’t forget, this can sometimes lead to getting exclusives from that artist).

I guess my point is that I see a tracklist as the ‘cost’ of using a distribution mechanism such as the Internet.

If you really do have a track that you want to keep secret then there’s nothing wrong with (occasionally) doing the classic ‘Artist’ = unknown/Track = ‘untitled’ trick. The OP mentioned white labels and this is basically the digital equivalent. Best to use this sparingly though, for the reasons I gave above.

GP

Hi and welcome to the forum!

I checked out your mix on Mixcloud. Overall I liked it. I made a few notes while I was listening. These are just my thoughts and are shared purely in the spirit of offering constructive feedback 🙂

– The transistions between tracks are very close together in a lot of cases. While this can create drama and excitement in a mix, it can also be quite tiring to listen to and frustrating if you’re just starting to get into a tune and then it vanishes! It’s a great skill to be able to move quickly between multiple tracks, but perhaps use it sparingly.

– In a similar way, FX should also be used sparingly. I’ll confess to being a recovering FX-aholic myself 🙂 It can be very tempting to use them but they can distract from the music if used too much.

– I don’t know if this was deliberate, but there a lot of volume shifts throughout the mix (sudden quiet to loud and visa versa). I found this quite hard to listen to. A fairly consistent volume helps the listener to get lost in the mix and more immersed in the music.

– A side-effect of the quick mixing I’m sure, I heard quite a lot of drop into drop mixing (the next track’s drop mixed into the drop of the playing track). While this can sometimes work if the tracks are in complementary keys or one is more minimal than the other, mixing two busy drops into each other is usually quite jarring. You can improve the flow between tracks by waiting until there’s less going on (most electronic music tracks have an ‘intro’ and ‘outro’ where it’s easier to blend the two tracks.

I hope that helps! Please keep posting mixes to this forum as I and the other guys here are always more than happy to help and offer advice.

You should also check out the Skills & Techniques section of the Digital DJ Tips site or one of the DJ Online Training Courses.

Good luck!

GP