Dj Shamann
2:01 AM - 16 March, 2011
If you're contsantly playing out 4 nights a week, different style clubs events each time, you're going to be really repetitive without an ample size library.
Hardcore Dancehall night - Commercial Dancehall night, two very different ball games (let's not get into actual Reggae nights)
If I play played at the slow pace of 20 songs per hour, I'm looking at 120 songs per night, just for that one subset of the genre. But since I included 2, we're looking at 240. But let's be honest, you are not playing a Dancehall song for 3 minutes a piece. more like a minute and half, and that's being very generous (and not how you would play if you're playing riddims). So now that doubles to 480 songs. If I kept my library at 2000 songs i could roughly play 4 nights before I've played my entire library, every single last song... how long before that gets old? And that's only commercial Daancehall and Hardcore Dancehall. What about the other genres? Shit before other genres, dubplates alone would eat up half of that 2000, am I not supposed to carry these with me?
I play full on nights of VERY different formats, like polar opposites. I'm not a playlist Dj, I'm not going to play "This Is How We Do It" and and "Be Faithful" every night for the rest of my life, that's lame. Some songs go over well with some crowds, some don't. Sometimes I play for Top 40 princesses, sometimes I play for music snobs. I will never limit myself by stripping down my library to a bare minimum, especially in this day and age where walking with thousands of songs takes up very little relative space.
Say if I played only 90's Hip Hop alone, that's an entire decade of some serious songs, think about how many songs that is.. What am I gonna play T.R.O.Y. into 93 Til Infinity every frigging time I play out when there is so much other good music from that time period? (And we haven't added the other decades yet)
Retro 80's, again, an entire decade that includes more than one genre, say if you weren't even diving deep but going the route of Billboard Top 100 (which will not get you very many real Retro gigs) that's 1000 songs for that decade...
House Music, if I were to choose 100 songs from each year including all the subgenres of only just personal songs, ones that I like, dating back to 88 (around the time I first started buying it) you're looking at 2200 songs right there not including what comes out this year.
Do you see where I'm going with all this? I can't base my library on cliche formula standards and what is or isn't getting requested by sheep, I respect the music much more than that... I respect myself much more than that.
