Since the upgrade from 1.6.2 to 2.0.0 I have seen multiple posts where people are talking of music libraries of 40k+ and one recently of 100k+.
As an ex vinyl DJ from the 90’s I used to cart around a single box of records the majority of I didn’t end up playing each Friday. If someone asked you for a song you didn’t have you would let them know that you would play it next week.
I can’t personally get my head around why you even need 10k tracks, let alone 100k? I have more tracks now (<1000) than I ever used to play during a year, or probably owned full stop!
I can help but think that these subscription services have given the DJ community the opportunity to have a ridiculously sized library which they will never use. Maybe I am just of a different generation?
The “big library djs” are generally open-format/wedding/event djs, who have to deal with requests and play “everything”.
I personally play progressive house/melodic house & techno and I try to keep my library under 4000 tracks, with about 1000 ‘playing tracks’.
I buy a lot of music, and at least once a month I delete the (older) tracks I don’t like much/anymore.
I’m one of those open format guys who used to play clubs (80s) but is now mobile, and my library can cater for most gig requirements. I think it’s around 50K at present. I rarely have to refuse a request.
Over 100,000 tracks in my collection, built up over 30 years including vinyl rips, cd rips and purchased downloads etc
For open format you need to have as many tracks as possible, also it’s good to note that buying single tracks used to be hellishly expensive compared to buying an album - buy 3 singles in a row from the same artist and you might as well have bought their album - so you ended up with 15 album tracks from them instead of the 3 - do that a few times a month and you’ve got 100 tracks you didn’t “need” but you ended up with. Follow that through annually and your up in the thousand tracks or so. And that’s on top of the tracks you did want.
There’s also the “I’ll buy it because maybe I might need it” situation, which swells collections. With a lot (not all) current music being in that zone of dreadful and with no staying power, you can easily find yourself buying a track, playing it once, if ever and it never seeing the speakers or even the headphones ever again. With such little notability, distinction, or staying power no wonder today’s DJs “need” features like play history, title colour changes to remind you that you played a track (coz you won’t remember it distinctly 10 mins later) and bpm/key compatibility being sometimes the only reason to play a particular filler track.
My music purchase patterns have drastically changed in the last 2-3 years; thanks mainly to Tidal. My main collection (on local drives) is expanding at its slowest rate ever, with me no longer needing to purchase “might play it, if someone requests it” tracks. If someone important at a gig requests something that I don’t have on my local drives, Tidal normally has it, just as quickly as the promo/record pool services have it, if not sooner.
I also find I’m not needing to buy variations of tracks to get “dj friendly” extended intros / outros as the Primes allow a lot of versatility with regards to looping etc. This also means my library is expanding less per annum than in previous years.
The customer expectation has shifted a lot in the world of instant ‘on-demand’ music and you’re now EXPECTED to have tracks they want. The days of dragging the record boxes around and playing the three decades of music (70s, 80s & 90s) are long gone. We now have to play five or six decades of music and they expect you to have the tracks they want to hear as they have Spotify/Apple Music/Tidal on their phones and smart speakers. If they can get it instantly then the expectation is that you should be able to (and in their eyes I’m rubbish if I don’t have it!).
While I don’t agree with it, it is the world we are in now.
Around 30k for open format use. For my specialties, deep house and hard techno it is around 2k songs. I am, however, not able to play that genresoften outside of my own home.
32k on my Prime series drive, but 700k total. Does anyone with 30k+ tracks actually get less than a 10 second load time when searching? The search times within the Prime series is unbearable.