So you want to be a DJ? One of the first things you will need to decide after you figure out what equipment you want to use will be how to get all the music you will be playing. I do not want to get into all the legal issues here because frankly I don’t think there is a DJ in the whole U.S. that actually does his trade 100% legally. That would involve paying performance fee’s and royalties for every song played and a requirement to track all of the song on your playlist. I have never met or heard of a DJ that does all of this, and any that tells you they are 100% legal in getting their songs is 99.9% likely to be incorrect.
With that being said, there are ways that at least feel more legal and are less likely to get you looked at by anyone when getting your songs for gigs. The two most popular are iTunes and Napster. Both let you purchase songs for around $.99 a song, and have a large selection of artists to choose from. The software is pretty straight forward on each and a few clicks will have the music flowing in no time. A different option is to go with Limewire P2P, but this has the risks of getting unedited or low quality copies of songs, and you are taking the risk of paying nothing towards license fees if anyone ever asked (although there are certain occasions that the only way to find the song you want may be this method.) So what should you pick? This DJ chooses to use Napster. A business accomplice I work with many times throughout the year chooses iTunes. It all depends on how you decide to use your music.
I have decided to take the Napster route. The majority of gigs I am involved in are at places with wi-fi connections. If you use Napster, you can actually stream the songs directly from the Napster servers without having to download. You also can use a laptop card or a tethered phone service to connect to your favorite cellular net provider and stream songs where w-ifi is unavailable. If you choose to download the songs, they are in a high quality windows media audio format and work well with any of your favorite music players, as long as Napster is installed and able to work. The biggest advantage is the price. 15 a month for a large majority of songs you could want, and library that can be played on the fly without paying $.99 per every song. You will occasionally run in to some songs that will cost you a dollar to download, but that’s much better than a dollar for every song you want. It seems hard for me to fathom having to pay a dollar for every song you want for a gig, when you may play 70 or more songs per gig. After a while of getting your library built up it would not be as bad, but why not just pay 15 a month and enjoy a large majority for nothing else.
iTunes is obviously all the craze in the portable music and DJ world. A large number of DJs I have seen use iTunes in one way or another, and are hard to show any other way of getting songs. Must be the apple craze, but I see no reason to it. It will get the job done if you need it to though, and is good to have as a quick source if Napster doesn’t have the artist you are looking for. Without he monthly fee, you are able to get only what you can’t find elsewhere (assuming it’s on iTunes,) and there is no other fee to use it.
I would almost call them compliments of each other. Napster is a good core service, while iTunes can get you few more songs that you may have a hard time finding. If I were to start my DJ gig all over again, I would go to Napster to start. The choice is obviously up to the individual, but unless someone can give me an argument for iTunes, I will stick with Napster.
No comments:
Post a Comment