Soundcloud - A DJ's Best Friend

By now, im sure many of you are familiar with soundcloud. It has become the industry standard for sharing your audio productions to record labels, internet radio stations, & fans. It enables you (depending on your account) to upload full DJ mixes, your tracks, make playlists, and even have direct links to buy your tracks from beatport, itunes, or where ever you want to direct your traffic. This is great for producers, and soundcloud specifically has high quality streaming audio. I am finding soundcloud is the best place to direct my audio listening traffic because I can offer free tracks, and pay tracks all in the same location.

But what I want to talk about today is how soundcloud can be DJs best friend...especially when on a tight schedule and you NEED to get some HOT tracks fast! Since soundcloud kind of works like a social network in a way that you can FOLLOW certain artists, its really easy to find the newest releases from your favorite artists. After clicking FOLLOW your favorite artists page, you then have a nice little tab at the top of the page to check all the tracks (newest - oldest) that have been released by your favorite artists.

This is a GREAT feature. What I really like about DJing, is finding nice underground tracks that no one has heard yet. Since a lot of small time (and kind of popular) artists use soundcloud for promotion, you can find tracks even before they are released. Now, this doesnt mean you can download them, but most of the time you can. Sometimes, when you are really lucky, artists will release FREE tracks....so when REALLY in a jam, and no credit card around, you can still find some rockin HOT tracks.

What I did, is went through all the tracks that I use when DJing...and picked out ALL of my favorite artists. Clicked FOLLOW. And now I have a huge list of all my favorite producers.

No longer do I have to search trackitdown, beatport, junodownload, when trying to gather new tracks quickly before a gig. Just log in to my soundcloud, and check whats new.

I really think this is the future of music finding. It enables you to stay up-to-date with TONS of artist's releases, and also lets you know MORE about them (location, website, remixes, label info, etc). It is really hard staying up-to-date with the thousands of different artists out there per genre...and this makes it really easy. Also, many of the BIG artists are not really using soundcloud....so it keeps me from playing tracks that everyone else is. I can also comment on the tracks, and send my love when I really think a track is bangin. I can also check out other artists who they follow, and find similar sounding artists. This is much better than surfing beatport...which only really features the BIG artists....and leaves the small ones to drown at the bottom of the flood.

This feature of soundcloud is great...and is my new favorite way to stay on top of whats new, and find NEW tracks. With paypal accounts set up at beatport, trackitdown, itunes, and junodownload...you can buy tracks quickly from the soundcloud link (which will direct you to a place to download). I can support artists that I like, and get tracks that are released within the week.

Peace!

FroBot