Is it out yet? Tracking a track until release

If you want a track release date notification for a tune that is not out yet, you have four options, and which one works depends on how much you know. If it has a Beatport pre-order or a Bandcamp pre-order page, follow that and you will be told on the day. If it has a Spotify pre-save, the date is on the page. If you only know the artist or label, follow them on Bandcamp and Beatport and you will hear about every release, including the one you want. If all you have is a clip and a timestamp from a set, none of those work, and you need something that searches the shops for you on a schedule until the track appears.

Most IDs worth chasing are in that last group. Here is how to handle each case, and how to stop the whole thing depending on your memory.

Work out what you actually know

Before you set anything up, write down what you have. It is usually one of these:

• Artist and title confirmed. The DJ said it, or the producer posted it. Easiest case.
• Artist known, title unknown. “Bicep - ID” in a tracklist. Common, and you can act on it.
• Label known. The tracklist says “forthcoming on” a label. You can act on this too.
• Nothing but a clip. A phone recording, a reel, a timestamp in a set. The hardest case and the most common one.

The vocabulary matters here. “Forthcoming” means signed and coming. “Unreleased” means nobody knows. “Dub” means a private file that may never come out. The glossary has the full list, and if the whole idea of an ID is new to you, what ID means in a DJ set is the place to start.

When the track is announced: pre-orders and pre-saves

Once a label has announced a release, the date is public and getting notified is easy.

Beatport pre-orders. Labels that put releases up early list them as pre-orders with full previews. Pre-order it and it lands in your downloads on release day. Even if you do not want to pay yet, the pre-order page carries the release date, and following the label means the release shows in your feed. The “coming soon” listings for a genre are worth a scan each week for the same reason.

Bandcamp pre-orders. Small labels put pre-orders up on Bandcamp weeks before the other shops, sometimes with one track downloadable straight away. Following the label means an email the moment the pre-order page goes up, and a pre-order gives you the download on the day. This is also the place where a “vinyl only” release gets a digital version later, so keep following even after the record has shipped.

Spotify pre-saves. Mostly used by bigger artists and distributors. The pre-save page lists the date. Pre-saving adds it to your library on release day, which is a decent reminder even if you would never play from Spotify.

Label socials and mailing lists. Release announcements go out on Instagram first, usually with a date in the caption. The problem is that you follow two hundred accounts, and the announcement scrolls past at eleven at night. That is why pre-orders beat social follows: the shop sends you the file, not a post you have to notice.

When you know the artist or the label but not the track

This is the “Artist - ID” case, and it is where following pays off.

Follow on Bandcamp. Artist follows and label follows both send email on every new release. Bandcamp is often earlier than the other shops for independent labels.

Follow on Beatport. Artist and label follows put releases in your feed. Beatport also carries pre-orders for a lot of labels that do not use Bandcamp, so following there covers the gap.

Watch the artist’s SoundCloud. Producers often post the release announcement on their own page with a “forthcoming” tag or an “out now” comment, and the preview clip lets you confirm it is the track you heard.

Check tracklists for the same ID. If several DJs are playing the same “Artist - ID” it is being road-tested and is probably signed. When one tracklist changes from “ID” to a real title, you have your name, and the search becomes trivial.

The limitation is that following an artist tells you about all their releases, not the one you want. For one or two artists that is fine. For twenty, it is a part-time job.

When all you have is a clip

Most of the IDs a DJ actually cares about start as a recording of a set, a reel with a caption that says nothing, or a timestamp in a two-hour mix. There is no artist to follow and no page to pre-order from. What you can do:

Identify as much as you can first. Read the caption and comments, look for a deck screen in the video, try Shazam and its equivalents, and ask in the comments of the original post. A track that is genuinely unreleased will not fingerprint, but you might get the artist or label from a comment, which moves you into the easier cases above.

Keep the clip. Not the link, the clip. Posts get deleted, and the clip is what you will fingerprint again later. The single most reliable way an unreleased ID gets found is that someone tries the fingerprint again after it comes out and the database now knows it.

Search the shops on a schedule. Every week or two, search Beatport, Bandcamp and SoundCloud for whatever fragments you have: a lyric, a sample name, the DJ’s name plus “ID”. Try the fingerprint again. This is the boring part, and it is the part people stop doing after a month, which is why so many IDs are found by other people first.

Post it where people look. A Discord IDs channel for your genre, the comments of the set recording, or a community hunt where other people can suggest names and vote on them. The community in ID Crate exists for this: share the clip, and diggers who recognise it can suggest an ID, and you are told when a suggestion is confirmed.

Let something else do the checking

The reason the “is it out yet” loop fails is not the first check. It is the fortieth. Nobody keeps searching the shops every week for a track they heard six months ago, so the release goes past and gets noticed a year later on a Beatport chart.

ID Crate’s crate is built to close that loop. Add the ID with whatever you have, whether that is a confirmed artist and title, an artist and a working title, or just the scanned clip, and it is re-scanned every day on Spotify, Apple Music, Beatport, Bandcamp and SoundCloud. The matching is fuzzy, because working titles change, and it scores remixes separately so an extended mix or a remix of the right track does not get missed or mistaken for the original. When a match appears, you get an email or a push notification, you accept or reject it, and an accepted find goes straight onto your buy list with the shop link resolved. Rejected matches teach the scanner what not to suggest next time. If you know the label rather than the track, a monitor on the label covers it from the other side. Registration is at app.idcrate.co.uk/register.

The point is not the notification. It is that the checking happens whether or not you remember.

Confirming it is really the one

When a candidate release appears, from any source, check it before you buy it.

• Listen to the full preview against your clip. A track that sounds similar in a 15-second reel can be a different tune from the same producer, or a different mix. Match the section you actually heard.
• Check the mix name. Original mix, extended mix, club mix, dub mix, and each remix are different files, and the one the DJ played is often the extended mix or a remix, not the radio edit that appears first on Spotify.
• Check the label and the date. A release that predates the set you heard it in is not an unreleased track, it is a track you missed, which is fine, but it is worth knowing which.
• Beware re-uploads. A YouTube video with the right title uploaded by a random account is not a release. A release has a label, a catalogue number and a shop page.

Pitfalls that catch people

Tracks that never come out. Some dubs are never released, because the sample cannot be cleared, the producer moved on, or it was only ever an edit for one DJ’s sets. If a track has been an ID for two or three years with no forthcoming tag anywhere, it may be one of those. Keep it on the list, but stop expecting it.

Titles that change. A track called one thing in a tracklist for a year comes out under another. If you are searching by exact title you will never see it. Search by artist, by lyric, and by fingerprint, not just by name.

Remix confusion. The DJ played a remix, and the original comes out first. Or the reverse. If you only track the original title, you might buy the wrong one or miss the right one. Track the version you heard, and note it.

Shop and date differences. A release can be on Bandcamp on a Friday and on Beatport two weeks later, or on Beatport as an exclusive before it hits everything else. If one shop has it, it is out.

Fake “out now” uploads. Bootleggers name their own edits after the unreleased track everyone is asking about. Check the source before you celebrate.

A simple system

If you want this to work without any tool at all, here is the minimum:

1. Every ID you care about goes in one list, with the clip saved and whatever facts you have: DJ, set, timestamp, suspected artist, suspected label.
2. Follow every artist and label on that list on Bandcamp and Beatport.
3. Pre-order anything that has a pre-order page.
4. Once a fortnight, search each unresolved ID on the shops and re-run the fingerprint on the clip.
5. When one lands, buy it that day, and cross it off.

Step four is the one that breaks. If you can keep it up, you will find most of your IDs the week they come out. If you cannot, hand it to something that runs every day, and spend the fortnightly session buying instead.