I’ve already uncovered a lot of urban myths in this blog and here’s another.

It is an urban myth that all DJ’s get their music for FREE.  It simply is not true.  Believe it or not it is very hard to get music for free (legally) these days.  You can’t even just write to the music publishing places and ask to be placed on their mailing lists, that’s not how it works – well, not for the humble Mobile DJ.

Mobile DJ’s are simply not seen as a good “output source” for new music by the record labels.  We also do not play to enough people on a weekly basis to even warrant the odd free CD single from time to time.  Let’s face it, the majority of the music we do play at parties these days is 80% oldies and 20% current chart so even if EMI sent us a stack of free CD’s, we would probably never play them anyway as they would be supplied so far in advance of release there’s a good chance that even YOU haven’t heard them yet!

This leads me on to the music channels on TV, they often play music so far ahead of release that we are pressured into trying to get hold of these future hits before they even hit the promo music services we can get tracks from (but not for free).  So imagine for a moment we’re playing at an 18th birthday, the songs being asked for would probably be still 2 or 3 months away from release yet they are being played continuously on channels like MTV Base.

The only options for us to either download illegally from Limewire or to actually purchase music.  Thankfully there are a few music services we can use where the tracks supplied on CD are within 3 or 4 weeks of release, so by this time the songs have already been played to death on the TV channels and on the radio.  The annoying problem is that not all of these CD Promo services subscribe to all of the labels, so you may get one service who specialises in pop, whereas all the dancey-type tracks are on another service.  In order to get the best of both you’re forced to buy both CD’s at around £20 each only to discover that 8 of the 15 tracks on both CD’s are duplicated on the other CD!

Fortunately, a lot of these promo services are waking up to supplying music digitally via download.  And at an average of 79p for a high quality MP3 it can show good value, especially as you get to choose which songs you want.  So instead of buying Now 73 featuring 40+ tracks of which only 10 you’d play, you then have to make the decision.  Do I get the 10 I want at 79p each or do I buy the whole album from Asda for a tenner?

Choices choices!