I Think We’ve Been Managing DJ Libraries Wrong

Hi there NuMark Nutjobs,

Over the past week I’ve been on calls roasting some more of your libraries. Ironically it was me that was roasting due to the heatwave we’ve been having here in the UK.

The library roasts and the thousands of tracks librarydojo analyses every month have confirmed something I’ve been thinking about for a little while. It’s a new way of thinking about your library. I call them ‘lenses’.

Lenses can help you find tracks faster, stay on-top of prep and finally tackle that massive psychologically damaging pile of tracks many of us have.

So what are they, and what do they mean?

It’d be a pretty lame newsletter if I didn’t tell you, so here we go.

This is the part of your library you’d invite to your birthday party. They are the tracks you actually use, the tracks you know work, and the tracks that you’ve prepped properly.

You regularly dip back into these tunes when creating your sets. They are the workhorses of your library.

They need to be highly visible and easily searchable. They should set the standard for the rest of your library.

These are tracks that don’t have the level of prep they need to be easily discovered or used safely in your library.

Because of that, they often don’t make it into your regular rotation - and that means they never get tested, reviewed or removed. That’s despite them potentially being great candidates to promote to your Trusted lens.

On older libraries you may have thousands of these.

The biggest problem I see in this lens is DJs adding more new music than they have time to prep. That means they often end up falling into lens 4.

But 3 traditionally comes before 4 so let’s talk about that next.

These tracks used to be on your decks all the time 5 years ago. Or you played a track once at a 3 year old’s potty training party, it was awesome and then you forgot about it again.

Often these tracks are prepped and ready to go, but because they aren’t in playlists or newer tracks have pushed them down they rarely get revisited or rediscovered.

Across the libraries I’ve analysed this is often where your hidden gems lie - the trouble is finding them again.

When I speak to DJs this is the part of their library that causes them the most stress.

It’s the behemoth of older, unplayed and potentially un-prepped old tracks that feels like a mountain too big to climb to ever sort out.

They pollute your library, making it harder to find the tracks you need.

DJs are almost universally afraid to just delete them incase there is ‘Hidden treasure’ or ‘Just in case’.

My original advice on this was to scorched earth it (after a backup). But my thinking is actually changing on this.

I think by turning this part of your library into just another lens is a better, and more practical way of thinking about it.

By treating these 12mb stress packages more like a review queue, and something separate from your active library you keep your trusted tracks to hand whilst not losing your musical history or pressing the scary delete button.

I’m still formulating my ideas on lenses and the best way to practically implement them for most DJs.

But I’ve got enough data now from the libraries I’ve analysed and the DJs I’ve been roasting (let’s pretend it was research) to have enough conviction this is something worth doing.

I’m completely rethinking how librarydojo might organise around lenses. And I’ll be putting together a video to show you how to introduce them into your rekordbox workflow soon - watch this space.

Are you already thinking about your library in this way? Does the idea of lenses sound like it’d solve the library problems you have right now? Let me know your thoughts in the comments or by replying.

See ya next time