Why Serious DJs Still Buy Their Music (And Don’t Rely On Streaming)

Not so long ago, digital DJs had no music streaming option at all. If you wanted to DJ, you needed the music files – downloaded, bought, or ripped – on your computer or USB drive. That was it.

Things have changed – fast. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Beatport, SoundCloud, and more have arrived on DJ software and hardware in the last couple of years. So it’s a fair question: why do serious DJs still bother owning music at all?

Read this next: The Best Music Streaming Services For DJs

Here’s our honest answer: if you’re a casual, bedroom DJ who just wants to mess around with playlists, you probably don’t need to own a collection. A streaming service inside something like Algoriddim’s Djay Pro is perfectly fine for that.

But the moment you start taking DJing seriously – and especially once you start playing in public or getting paid – everything changes.

5 Reasons Serious DJs Still Buy Music

It comes down to five things. And whether you’re playing your first paid gig or you’ve been at this for years, all five are worth understanding.

Some are practical, some are about protecting yourself, and one gets to the heart of why DJs care so much about their music in the first place. If you rely on streaming alone, at least one of these will catch you out eventually.

1. No service has all the world’s music

Even with streaming services claiming 100 million-plus songs, it doesn’t take long to spot the gaps. Back in the vinyl days, crate digging across multiple shops and sources was just part of the game.

Relying on one place for everything was never the approach – and nothing’s really changed. If you want access to everything, you’re not going to find it all in one place.

2. Tracks disappear without warning

Streaming services license music, and that licensing is complicated. Contracts expire, artists pull their music, services create exclusives. A track that’s there today might be greyed out next week – and nobody’s going to tell you.

Try this: grab a playlist of a couple of hundred tracks you like and set a reminder to check it in a few weeks. Guaranteed, something on there will be unavailable. As a DJ, your music is everything – you really don’t want anyone taking that away from you.

3. You get fewer features with streamed music

DJ software loves to pre-analyse your music: BPM, key, beatgrids, stems, cue points, loops. All of that relies on the software having seen a track before you want to play it. With streaming, that analysis either has to happen on the fly or not at all.

There’s still software that only lets you use one streaming service at a time. You also can’t record your sets when streaming – the licensing won’t allow it. The more you dig into what you can’t do, the more limiting it becomes.

4. The internet will let you down

Connectivity is getting better, but the places you need it most – packed clubs, busy venues – are exactly where it’s most likely to fail. How bad does it look turning up to a gig and not being able to play your music?

Some services offer offline caching, which helps, but it’s more to organise ahead of time and removes the spontaneity of searching for what you need in the moment.

5. You’re locked into someone else’s business plan

Subscription prices go up, features change, whole services disappear. Pulselocker was an early DJ streaming service that vanished overnight, leaving its users with nothing. Tidal, for all its good work for DJs, has around 0.3% of the streaming market. Whether that’s sustainable long-term, nobody really knows.

DJs are not the priority for these platforms. If something changes that’s good for most of their users, it won’t necessarily bode well for us.

Read this next: The Playlist Pyramid – From Music Discovery To Great DJ Sets

Finally…

At the school, we have a simple rule we share with every student: stream the music you like, own the music you love.

Streaming is brilliant for discovering new music, listening to what other DJs are playing, and keeping music on throughout your day. We recommend it! But for your serious DJ music – the tracks you’re going to play at gigs, the ones that matter – own them.

Where to buy music, how to organise it, how to build your crates, and how to use playlists properly: all of that is covered in detail in Rock The Dancefloor!, our book on how to DJ the modern way. We’ve love for you to have a free copy on us – just click here to grab it.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, our All-Access Pass gives you lifetime access to every course we make, including everything you need to go from wherever you are now to a confident, gigging DJ.