“It is often better to listen to stuff that makes you uncomfortable – that’s when you broaden your tastes and become more knowledgeable.”
By: Phil Morse
Whether you’re a music fan looking to expand your knowledge, an amateur DJ who wants to broaden your horizons, or an experienced DJ looking for new ideas, I’m here to share with you my secret to discovering new music as a DJ of over 30 years.
DJs will hear more of the world’s music than your average person, so they can pick the best of that music for their own collection – music that talks to you personally. But in a world that is overflowing with music, it can be hard to find exactly that, or know where to start. So, here are my five golden rules that will help you listen to and discover more music:
- Listen to music anywhere and everywhere.
Your job is to build music into your life to such an extent that it’s harder to avoid it than it is to keep listening. Use your phone alarm to wake up? Set a playlist on a smart speaker in your bedroom instead. Make sure you have speakers in every room of your house (Airplay, Sonos, whatever). Obviously, now’s the time to subscribe to a music-streaming service if you’ve had your head in the sand for the last decade, and get its app on your laptop and phone, keeping it packed with playlists for both when you’re at home and when you’re out and about.
Set every preset on your car radio to a different music channel. If you’re allowed headphones at work, wear ’em. When you go out, try to go to a music bar rather than a sports bar (for instance). Wear headphones at the gym, walking the dog, while running, on planes… you get the idea. No silence.
- Listen to anything and everything.
This isn’t about being painfully cool; it’s about listening to music – any music. From death metal to kiddies’ TV themes, classical to country, this is your chance to hear music of all types, not just music you’d play, buy or even particularly like.
The point is to have music on. Indeed, it is often better to listen to stuff that makes you uncomfortable – that’s when you broaden your tastes and become more knowledgeable.
- Don’t think too much about it.
This is, at first, a hard one to do, but you will get better at it. Listening to music 24/7 is not about having long debates with yourself over whether what you’re hearing is worthy or not, whether you could play it in a DJ set, or anything else cerebral, for that matter. If you cave in to consciously grading, sorting and organizing the music you hear, you’ll be exhausted pretty quickly and find yourself turning it off to get a break from yourself.
This is about feelings, not thoughts; emotions, not reasons. When a joke makes you laugh, do you analyze why it made you laugh? Of course not. Nor should you analyze the music you’ve got on. Just have it on.
- Notice what interests you.
As from now on, you’ll be playing music all the time, and as you’re not going to overanalyze it, you’re inevitably going to mentally switch off and almost forget you have music on at all. That’s exactly what we want because now you’ll be listening like a “normal” person, not a DJ.
When something grabs your attention, it will do so not via the critical faculties of a hard-to-please DJ, but because deep down you like something about whatever the piece of music is. It’s important to realize that what it is you like about that tune is not important.
You may notice it because it’s a great song, because it really annoys you, because it sounds like something else in your collection, because it’s the first tune you’ve heard loud for ages – whatever. Learn to acknowledge that something has got your attention, take note of that fact, and get on with your day.
- Religiously note all such tunes.
Using a note-taking app on your smartphone, or a music-recognition app like Shazam, or just good-old pen and paper, scribble down names, artists and even snippets of lyrics for you to search later, if that’s all you can get. Just try and get some kind of placeholder for that tune in your system.
Outside of this, it’s also important to consider where you’re getting your music from. If you’re looking to DJ local gigs, check out the Shazam charts for your area (which can be found on Shazam’s website), as well as local radio stations to see what’s popular near you. There are also online sources such as Bandcamp, Mixcloud and SoundCloud; these three alone can introduce you to a huge range of shows, music and producers that you won’t find anywhere else.
Furthermore, make use of social media where you can follow DJs, labels and channels that interest you. So, every time you come back, there’s a pile of suggestions for you to get started with.
Finally, don’t forget the music you already have, revisit some old classics, and you don’t know what you might find or re-discover. Keep these rules in mind, switch up your sources from time to time, and you’ll constantly be discovering new music.
This is an adapted extract from the 2nd Edition of Phil Morse’s book, Rock the Dancefloor! With a DJ career spanning more than 30 years, Morse is also the founder and CEO of Digital DJ Tips, the world’s largest online DJ school.
