Exposing the Fatal Flaws in 60 DJ Libraries

Even my own library was making this grave mistake

Hi there Transformer Trainees,

Last month 60 of you submitted your libraries to me for a roasting on the Youtube channel. I was expecting completely unique problems, but actually it boiled down to the same 3 common issues:

• Curation

• Creativity

• Care

One of the most critical issues to fix out of these is Curation. It’s what defines your sound and ultimately helps you play unique and creative sets.

In this email I’ll show you how I discovered a curation problem in my library that I didn’t know existed, and what I’m doing to fix it.

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Identifying the problem

Good curation is a bit like force feeding your library a healthy diet. Put loads of nutritious track veggies in its gob and it’ll have abs of steel and probably a lambo almost by default. Feed it with burgers and chips and it’ll smell like farts and have no girlfriend.

There are usually two tell tale signs you are adding a burger track to your library:

• You never prep it (adding cues/metadata etc)

• You never play it

But this is REALLY hard to spot in your Rekordbox library. It’s all too easy for bloat to set in, especially over a long time period because Rekordbox gives you no easy way to track it.

I’m building a new tool to help you understand your library better, spot bad habits before they trip you up and help you take action.

One of my favourite new features I’m building is called the ‘Funnel of shame’.

Here’s how it works:

• At the top are all the tracks you’ve currently got in your library.

• Of that amount, the next level down shows the amount with > 1 cue point (aka, prepped)

• At the bottom of this shame spire is the amount of prepped tracks that have actually been played.

For fun, I thought I’d run it on my own, naturally perfect library.

Funnel of shame

Oh shit.

Because comparing yourself to others is the best way to achieve happiness, here’s a funnel from another DJ’s library that I’ve been testing with:

That did not make me feel better.

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What I learned about my library

The ideal funnel would actually be a perfect rectangle. Every track that gets added gets prepped and gets played.

The smaller those lower levels are and the more triangular your funnel is, the bigger your curation problem.

The second library is more rectangle shaped than my, more pythagorus-friendly funnel. The other DJ is doing a better (but still not perfect) job of actually prepping and playing what they add. Aka, they have a better curation process.

I’ll be honest, until I’d seen this unique insight I thought I was doing a very solid job of curation.

But as it turns out nearly 50% of my tracks are stinking up the joint, making it harder to select tracks during a set and bloating my library.

So I found a problem I didn’t know existed. And it was probably affecting my ability to play high quality sets. What can I do about it?

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How am I going to fix this?

A lot of tackling a curation problem actually happens in 2 other stages of the library process.

1. Fixing the root cause

Crate Digging

Thoughtful crate digging is one of the biggest level ups you can make in your DJing. Ensuring that you are actively hunting out high quality tracks that have a higher likelihood of making it into your sets.

For example:

• Finding more tracks by artists you play a lot

• Understanding the gaps or bias in your digging over time

• Ensuring you are finding fresh music regularly

I’ve got better at this recently. But I’ve realised I can be even more intentional about not just what I’m letting in, but what I’m even considering to be let in.

How can I gather the best pool of new tracks possible, based on the gaps in my library and the types of tracks I’m most likely to actually play?

2. Fixing the symptoms

Care

Depending how large your library is, many DJs find the task of removing stinker tracks that bypassed your curation gate daunting - and emotionally stressful.

• Killing duplicates

• Reviewing tracks with no plays

• Finding tracks that aren’t in any playlists

What I realised was there’s currently no easy way to do any of these tasks. Even existing paid tools like Lexicon only cover off some of them.

I’m building something completely new that will help you create a scalable library system rather than just batch processing meta data and hoping for the best. It’s going to give you deep insights all mapped to my 5C library system that I teach on the channel:

• Crate digging

• Curation

• Categorisation

• Creativity

• Care

Beta testing is starting this week with readers from this very newsletter. I’ll share more in the next email. Watch this space!

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In other news

• A big thank you to my 3 library roasting victims! It’s not easy to put yourself out there and seek help. I learnt a lot from the process and hopefully you did too. Show some love by giving them a follow on their sosh meeds:

  • Julia [Instagram]

  • Zander [Instagram]

  • Wolve

• I was blown away by the amount of beta tester applications for the new tool. I’ll be working closely with the selected group to make sure this tool gives genuine long term value to all kinds of different DJs and library setups