How to find new music as a DJ, without doomscrolling

The way to find new music as a DJ without giving your evenings to a feed is to swap the scroll for a short list of sources you check on a schedule, one place where every track you like goes the moment you hear it, and a single session a week where you go through that place and buy. The sources are Bandcamp follows and tags, the label pages and DJ charts on Beatport rather than its front page, a handful of SoundCloud accounts whose reposts you trust, two or three radio shows, a Discord or two, a record shop, and the promo lists of labels you actually play. The place is a list, anywhere outside your head. The session is twenty minutes on a fixed day. That routine finds more music than an hour of scrolling every night, and it finds music the people around you have not already found.

Here is why the feed is a poor digging tool, what each source is good for, and how to make the whole thing a habit.

Why the feed finds the wrong music

A recommendation feed is built to keep you on it, which is a different goal from finding you a track. It shows you what people like you have already engaged with, so the more you use it, the more it hands you the tracks every other DJ in your scene got handed the same week. The IDs you want are the ones that have not reached the algorithm yet: the label’s Bandcamp release that has been out for a fortnight and nobody has posted, the promo that is three weeks from Beatport, the B-side on a record in a shop’s used section.

The feed also has no memory. You hear something, you like it, you keep scrolling, and it is gone under forty other things by the time you next have a laptop open. Digging without somewhere to put the finds is how a DJ ends up with a phone full of saved videos and no new music.

The sources, and what each one is for

Bandcamp

Follow the labels and artists you play and Bandcamp emails you on release day, which for a lot of small labels is days or weeks before the same music reaches the bigger shops. The tag pages are a decent way into a new corner, but the best discovery tool on the site is the list of supporters under each release: people who paid for this, each with a collection you can open. Find one buyer whose collection overlaps with yours by half and you have a curator for the year. Bandcamp Friday, when the site waives its cut on certain first Fridays, is a good day to batch the buying.

Beatport

The Top 100 is what every DJ in your genre is playing, which is a reason to know it and a reason not to build a crate from it. The useful pages are the ones nobody looks at: individual label pages sorted by release date, the DJ charts from artists whose sets you rate, and the Hype chart for the smaller labels. Make a list of fifteen labels and check their pages every couple of weeks. Beatport LINK is a good way to hear a full track before buying, and a poor way to find tracks, for the reasons above. The buying article covers what each shop is actually for.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is where unreleased music lives: previews, promos, radio rips and edits. The way to use it without scrolling is to follow a small number of accounts, ten or so, and let your feed be their uploads and reposts only. Labels posting forthcoming releases, DJs who post their radio shows, and a couple of reposters with taste is enough. The likes of a DJ you admire are usually public and are a better chart than any chart. Free downloads on SoundCloud are real music; file them like bought music.

Radio shows and mixes

A weekly show is a curator doing your digging for you, with a tracklist, on a schedule. Two or three shows in your area of music, listened to properly rather than as background, will surface more playable tracks a month than any store. Stations like NTS and Rinse, the specialist residencies on national radio, and label-run shows on Mixcloud and SoundCloud mostly publish tracklists, or have listeners who do. When a show does not, the guide to identifying tracks in a mix covers the tools.

Discord and forums

Most labels and a lot of DJs run a Discord now, and the ID channels in them are the modern version of the record shop conversation: someone posts a clip from a set, someone else knows what it is, and the label drops a promo code on Friday. Join two or three, mute everything except the release and ID channels, and check them on your digging day rather than as they happen. The old forums still have life in the specialist genres and the used-vinyl trade.

Record shops

A shop with a listening post and a person behind the counter who plays out is still the highest hit rate per hour of any source, because the stock has been chosen and the person will hand you the five records you should hear. The digital side of that is Discogs, where the “people who bought this also bought” trail and the seller inventories are a way into a decade of music that never had a digital release. Budget a Saturday a month.

Promo lists

If you play out, the labels you play want you playing their records early. Sign up to their mailing lists, reply to promos with a line of honest feedback, and after a while you are on the list that gets the pre-release. For electronic music the promo services are invitation-based and depend on being someone the label has heard of, so post your sets and tag the labels. For open format, hip hop and pop, the subscription record pools are the standard route to clean edits and intros.

Follow people, not genres

Genres are how shops organise stock. People are how music actually travels. Every good source in the list above is really a person or a small group of them: the label owner, the radio host, the Bandcamp supporter with the great collection, the DJ whose likes you check. When you find one, follow them everywhere they post, and look at who they follow. A chain of five or six people with taste, refreshed once a year as tastes drift, is a better digging system than any tool.

Work backwards from sets

The fastest way to find music you will actually play is to hear it played. Sets from DJs you rate are full of tracks that have already passed one test, and a lot of them come with tracklists on 1001Tracklists or in the comments. For the ones that do not, note the timestamp and the name of the set, and identify them in one go on your digging day rather than trying to Shazam a phone speaker in a club. The glossary explains the ID conventions if you are new to the hunt, and unreleased tracks get their own routine: note it, watch for it, buy it when it lands.

Make it a routine

The difference between a DJ who scrolls and a DJ who digs is a calendar, not effort.

• One inbox. Every clip, link, ID, screenshot and “what was that” goes into one list the moment it happens. A notes app, a spreadsheet, a playlist, whatever you will actually open. Nothing else is allowed to hold a find.
• One digging session a week, time-boxed. Twenty to thirty minutes on a fixed evening. Go through the sources in order: mailing list emails, Bandcamp notifications, the fifteen label pages, the ten SoundCloud accounts, the Discord channels, the tracklists from the sets you saved. Add to the inbox. Do not buy.
• One buying session a week. Open the inbox, listen to everything once, buy what survived a week of not being new any more, delete the rest. Batching kills the impulse purchases and makes you go back to the three-week-old finds that would otherwise be buried.
• File immediately. Rename, tag, analyse, into the month’s playlist. The gap between buying and filing is where music goes missing.
• Unsubscribe from anything you skipped three weeks running. The list of sources should get shorter, not longer.

Let the releases come to you

The part of this that is hardest to keep up by hand is the waiting. A track you heard in a set in March is not out, the artist has no release date, and checking Beatport every Friday for something that may never appear is exactly the kind of loop that turns back into scrolling. ID Crate’s monitors watch an artist, a label, a title or a lyric across Spotify, Apple Music and Beatport and tell you when something matching appears, so the checking happens without you. Confirmed finds can spin up an artist monitor of their own, which means the producer behind one good ID becomes a source you follow automatically. Whatever tool you use for it, the principle is the same: the sources you check on a schedule are for discovery, and anything you are waiting for should be watched by something that does not get bored.

Keep what you find

Music that sits in a likes list is not found yet. The end of the routine is a file in the library with the right name, the right tags and an energy number, in a playlist you will open when you plan the next set. If that step is slow, the whole routine collapses back into a pile of links, so make it easy: an inbox folder for downloads, one tag editor, one afternoon a month to clear anything that has slipped. The library article covers the folder and tag scheme that keeps a collection usable for years.

What to do with the time you get back

Listen to whole records. The feed teaches you to judge a track in eight seconds, and eight seconds is the hook, not the intro you will actually be mixing. An hour a week spent listening to full releases from three labels you trust, at proper volume, will change what you buy more than any amount of scrolling, and it is the part of this that people who came up through record shops had by default. Get it back on purpose.