Playlist Power

It’s no secret that getting into some of Spotify’s curated playlists is the holy grail for a lot of consumer-facing labels. So how would that cross over into DJing? It’s certainly not harmful to make it into the Beatport Top 10, nor is it to find your track in a high-profile DJ’s Resident Advisor chart. But their influence, when it comes to reach at least, isn’t on the same scale as being picked for a popular Spotify playlist.

As it stands, DJs are still required to use physical media to play music in clubs. But over the past year, SoundCloud and Beatport, via their new LINK streaming service, have started allowing DJs to stream their catalogues directly into DJ software and hardware.

DENON DJ’s recently announced SC6000 PRIME player has streaming at its heart, with both WiFi and ethernet internet available for streaming tracks from various platforms like TiDAL, Beatport’s LINK and SoundCloud, without physical media required.

Artists have been curating playlist charts for years on Beatport, but with LINK, you’ll be able to access the playlists directly inside your DJing tools. Not only that, but the playlists often reflect an actual set that DJ has recently played, or a vibe or part of the night, like this ‘Warm Up’ playlist from LOUISAHHH! or this ‘Techno Set Starters’ playlist, curated by Beatport. Playlists can also be curated by labels, or even events like Tomorrowland or ADE. Beatport told us that soon users will be able to create and share their own LINK playlists.

Getting into these playlists won’t be the same as breaking into a curated Spotify playlist with millions of subscribers, but it can certainly help. Beatport have yet to reveal what the royalty payments will be for a single stream on LINK, but as we’ve discussed at length in our recent feature on royalties and DJing, a single play at a major festival could be worth £50, and with cloud DJing potentially offering more accurate data for PROs, producers in these playlists could see their royalties increase significantly.

Being able to essentially reach inside your favourite DJ’s record collection, without purchasing or downloading any files, is one thing, but the files are also pre-analysed for bpm and key, meaning you can immediately start testing out some tracks that you’re sure will work together. The implications of such a service could lead to an interactive music discovery service, where not only does machine learning monitor our tastes, but also our DJing style, and suggest tracks appropriately.

It could also lead to a drop in the fundamental skills of DJing, a lack of cultural awareness around DJing’s core values and a lack of experimentation. Without genre-crossing experimentation, this could result in a musically and culturally homogenised generation of press-play DJs.

When it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning recommending tracks for you to play next, based on your history and the history of other DJs, Beatport have yet to reveal anything on the same scale as Spotify. But with the same feature already present in rekordbox dj – based on your local, offline library – and other DJing software via Related Tracks, it’s by no means a stretch to suggest Beatport LINK could offer something similar in the future. Companies like Echo Nest provide this service already, so a collab here is all it would take.

Eventually, if and when cloud DJing is more widely adopted, we’re not only likely to see recommendations based on what other DJs played next, but potentially where your favourite DJs set their cue and loop points, and at what average point other DJs began mixing out of the track, once DJ mixers become connected to the internet too. DENON DJ’s new X1850 mixer features a “5-port LAN hub” and while no features have been announced around monitoring how the mixer is being used, with the faders and knobs active for MIDI mapping, it’s certainly a possible future feature.