The Dreaded DJ Task: Re-Organization
It’s very easy as a DJ to fall into a trap of playing songs from two buckets:
Newer, popular songs
Older, comfortable throwbacks
While I try to regularly shake up my “popular” picks, as well as my “throwback” picks, it’s still hard to shake that feeling of repetition and monotony at times. The easiest way for most DJs to approach this problem that we all face is to try out brand-new songs. This can work great, in moderation, and after a night of moderate experimentation I often get feedback along the lines of:
“I didn’t know many of the songs tonight, some of the new stuff felt familiar enough to dance to but I was a little outside of my comfort zone”
I generally prefer that feedback to “I knew every song and was bored and uninspired all night”, but I still feel like I can do better. How? Through a grueling, time-consuming, yet ultimately inspiring process called “going through and re-sorting my entire library”.
Yes, you heard that right, my entire library. How many songs does that entail? Well if we’re just going off my sorted music, it’s just south of 7000. If we include new additions needing to be sorted, we start getting into the 9000 range. Does this mean I listened to every single one of these songs during the process of re-sorting? Yep, at least enough of a snippet to decide if it’s worth keeping and where to put it.
You may wonder why I would go through such an arduous process if I already had my music sorted, and the reason is that unless a song manages to make it into one of the first two buckets I mentioned in this post within a month or so of being downloaded, it rarely escapes the depths of my library unless I happen upon it by chance through shuffling, etc.
Were the majority of the 9000 songs I re-listened to great and worthy of reviving? Absolutely not! A good majority got shuffled out of my folders and into permanent retirement. But the gems I re-discovered will be worth all the hours this took, in my opinion, and I hope that by giving my library a proper re-examination I will be better equipped to accurately find the right vibe I’m looking for going forwards. And I believe it will result in more loosely familiar songs from the past making their way back into my playlists in an organic manner, allowing me to broaden the range of throwbacks I play, without having to rely so heavily on the same 100 classics we tend to pull from to fill the floor.
I hope this was an interesting look behind the curtains of DJ organization(exciting stuff I know), and I hope this sheds some more light on the sheer amount of work it takes for WCS DJs to prepare behind the scenes for that one-hour set that can seem easy to the onlooker. Remember that even if it looks like we’re just hitting play sometimes, that playlist could have taken days, if not weeks worth of work between research, discovery, downloading, cataloging, organizing, testing, playlist creation, etc.
Although I would have infinitely more money today if I had never started DJing for WCS in the first place, the journey, the experiences, the artistic expression it allows me, and that electric energy when a song hits at just the right moment in a crowded ballroom makes it worth every hour spent for me. While I will be further exploring different avenues such as judging, teaching, community building, and more next year, I hope to continue making an impact with every set I put together.