Any other IndieHacker DJs? How do you find new music?

by Adam

I'm a programmer and part-time DJ and i'm trying to figure out if some of the itches I have myself are shared by others.

What is your current approach to finding new music?
How often (or in which circumstances) do you search for new music?
How does that work for you? What annoys you?
Did you search for a dedicated tool or info to do this?

Any feedback here is highly appreciated, thank you!

Adam

posted to

Ideas and Validation

on January 21, 2020

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Don't underestimate SoundCloud and some of the more popular Subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/

https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/

Not all of this will scratch your itch, but chances are that you can find some up-and-coming talent that won't cost you an arm and a leg for licensing fees.

c0nsilience

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4 years ago
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  I agree, my own problem with these reddits are the huge variability in quality. It is hard to listen to many songs on such forums since you have to click on each thread and then a few clicks more to actually listen and judge the song. But maybe you experience this differently?
  
  advanderveer
  
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  4 years ago
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    I agree with you. Without an aggregator of sorts, it does make it very time-consuming. On occasion, they'll run some sort of 'Friday Feedback' thread or something along those lines where at least the newer music is aggregated into one thread. Perhaps one could build a service for Reddit to scrape the media form a sub, or a thread, and aggregate it into something a bit more palatable? =)
    
    c0nsilience
    
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    4 years ago
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      Yes! Might be an interesting one for @akfaew & https://syften.com/
      
      advanderveer
      
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      4 years ago
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        Oh, that's really cool! :)
        
        c0nsilience
        
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        4 years ago
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- Follow labels on Beatport
- Whenever i have brain power (yes, it takes brain power to listen to music when you're a DJ), so that could be multiple times a day, or once in a week. Usually happens when i have a low cognitive task to perform and don't mind the music.
- It's incredibly frustrating to find music i like, the ratio of music i listen to to music i buy is 300 / 1. I've been told Spotify is better as suggesting music, but I have a workflow for beatport and don't want to swap it. Also not all tracks on spotify can be found on Beatport, vice versa. I'd need a recommendation engine that works, and scrapes from all sources (beaport, spotify, bandcamp, soundcloud).
- Yes, even looked into acoustic fingerprinting. This is a hard problem. But if the only improvement was to serve me a playlist that is controlled by keyboard, where my current position is bookmarkable, never has a duplicate in it (or a selectable fuzz factor to play older tunes based on other sources like Beatport featured playlists etc), that would still be a vast improvement.
stephane

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4 years ago
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  Thank you! Spotify only works well for me with discover weekly, but that is only once a week. The radio feature just keeps recommending me tracks that I already heard and never really goes beyond artists/labels I already know.
  
  "current position is bookmarkable, never has a duplicate in it" This, exactly! Its so excruciating to get back to a beatport chart and having to re-listen to music I already dismissed 3x times.
  
  So as I understand it, music discovery is not a active task for you perse, you do it when performing some other work? Or do you still skip through tracks if it doesn't match your style/taste?
  
  When you do engage music discovery mode, for how long would you usually do it? How much time would you save if the process would be optimized (ballpark)?
  
  Do you DJ professionally?
  advanderveer
  
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  4 years ago
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    Yes, if it sucks so bad, I will switch to the browser where beatport is running, click on the beatport tab, press the right arrow key to skip to the next one. All of this could be done with a single keyboard shortcut in an ideal scenario. I only ever hear the fragment that beaport has chosen to make available, but I need to switch to youtube for the full version when I think I found something that 1) is good 2) has interesting bits that are not audible in the beaport player.
    
    Semi regularly. It will usually be triggered when there is a round of 10%-20%-50% price reduction coming up. Then I try to clear my listening backlog while working and to further distill the holding bin until i'm left with 15-30 tracks.
    
    Yes initially, but now for friends and for fun. Getting paid for one's passion has a funny way of making that passion feel like work, ESPECIALLY THE SEARCH FOR MUSIC.
    
    stephane
    
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    4 years ago
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      Thank you for the feedback, I believe this is a problem worth solving as an indie hacker project. At least from a "scratch your own itch" perspective, but I wanna talk to a few more DJs as well.
      
      On the other side, not sure if DJs themselves are willing to pay for something like this or that it would require another source of revenue?
      
      Let me know if you wanna be kept in the loop!
      
      advanderveer
      
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      4 years ago
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        Sure let me know how it goes. You might be able to monetize it if providing an affiliate buy link for each platform (google play, beatport, junodownload, bandcamp, spotify). The hard part is figuring out which platform has which title. Some titles are on multiple platforms, while others are on one platform only, and yet others are edits and bootlegs, in which case all you have is a link to a youtube video or soundcloud track.
        
        stephane
        
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        4 years ago
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        Cool, will do. The affiliate linking is nice as well, thank you!
        
        advanderveer
        
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        4 years ago
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