Weekly Dance 7/20/15 - How to Find New Music

Hey everyone, ALYXX again. This post I'm not really talking about music itself as much, more about me talking to you guys about where in the heck I find new stuff to post! If you came for music, thank you so much, I just did a post on Saturday about Melbourne Bounce if you want to go check that out. In fact, here's some more Bounce :)https://soundcloud.com/willsparks/melbourne-tributeBut the bulk of this post I want to talk about an issue of our generation. Back in the old days finding new music wasn't that much of a trouble; you headed to your local record store (or CD/music/video store, depending how old you were), and you checked out what was new. Nowadays, at least 1000 tracks are pasted up onto the worldwide web through portals like iTunes, Beatport, YouTube, Spotify, and some obscure app you probably haven't even heard of. You can tune into the top 10 lists of these services or give the radio a go, but you'll always be a few steps behind everyone else, and your playlist won't be as cool! We all want to be cool. Trust me, I know!Life stories aside, where do I find music? I personally use a number of portals; like everyone else, I do buy a lot of music through stores like iTunes and Beatport. As a radio station, we have access to some sources where we get promotional copies of music to play out, and that helps a good amount. There isn't too much on the electronic side though, so I also tried out a record pool service (ZipDJ) for alternative sourcing. That, coupled with the occasional track that a producer gives away on YouTube/Soundcloud gives me a pretty hearty list to keep up with.The problem is, if you do that math the above loads me with about 17 hours of listening a day, and there are only 24 hours in a day. As much as I love music, I can't spend every waking hour browsing music, I'm only human after all! When I'm looking around for new music, I make a pact with myself to be open to new things, but extremely picky. The last thing you want in your library is a thousand "meh" tracks and a hundred or so that I actually like. Your library would get crowded, and overall it makes listening to music less fun. If you DJ live like I do, it also makes picking out the right track much harder than it needs to be! Even if you don't go through as much music as this, it makes sense to apply discretion to picking up music; buying less "meh" music anyways will save you money in the long run. You should be digging through fresh music, not your music library! For me, since I see a lot of new artists passing by, my bare criteria for downloading a track is thata) it has to be mastered well (Vocals are balanced if present, if it has a drop, it should sound full and not under some sort of limiter, etc.)b) it has to do something a little different (If I feel like I've heard this before...there ought to be some sort of interesting switch up in timbre, tone, something for me to bite on! Otherwise it's just the same track as before.).Oddly enough that narrows down my list pretty well; there's always that new artist out there trying to be the next Hardwell or Steve Aoki. As the great Laidback Luke said it, "Do you want to be a fake Hardwell or a fake Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike? Or do you want to be you and stand out?" (click here afterwards for some knowledge). If you don't like a track but five of your friends do, that doesn't mean you need to pick it up. If I'm having a particularly hard time finding a track for a genre in my record pools, I'll go on a blind chase on a few audio sites. My record pool is where the bulk of my music comes from, but genres like Melbourne Bounce, Epic Trance, or Melodic Dubstep are a little harder to find. I'll visit a site like melbournebounce.com.au for Bounce or MrSuicideSheep's Youtube Channel for dubstep. If I find an artist I like, I start looking for more of his stuff on Soundcloud, etc., and crucially, more related artists producing a similar sound. It's a networking game at this point (I'm sure you've heard that term a million times :P ), but really, this gets me pretty nestled into a section of artists producing the genre I like. Then I can go and backsearch it in my record pools in case I missed them in an earlier release, or I can just pay for the track on my own. The music sites so far have been pretty good at selling you related artists and the music themselves, so it's a win win scenario! Hopefully that gives you guys some insight on where in the world we DJ's here at Pizza and around the world figure out what to play! Music is a wave, it changes every day, just gotta find your own way :)