The Serato.com forum has been online since February 2004, and over the past 11 years, we've had a huge number of DJs visit to get help / help others, share cool stories from the DJ world, react to news and much more... We've seen it all here at Serato HQ!
Welcome to a new blog series where we discuss some of the most famous, frequent and controversial questions and topics from the Serato Forum. First up, "Help me with my DJ name!"
When starting out you're probably best to practice your skills than worry about a DJ name, but there's always that first gig when you'll get asked, "what name do you play under?" Here's a bit of help for when that time comes.
How did Serato get our name?
Before we dive into helping with your DJ name, you might be wondering how we un-earthed the name, Serato? Which came first, Serato or the Kia Cerato? 😂
Here's the backstory...
The name resulted after three months of intense design and refinement by the four founding members who gathered weekly, questing for the perfect company name.
The criteria were simple: a word no more than six letters long, a word not found in any dictionary of any language, a word so scarce on the Internet that it could be considered new, a word that remained a dot-com virgin, and a word that rolls of the tongue like hot butter. Many meetings and reams of randomly generated words narrowed the candidates to four. A vote was cast and "Serato" came into the world.
Taking the Serato backstory into consideration, there's a few things to consider when thinking of a name.
- It's unique
- It's memorable
- You like it!
Firstly, you want your name to be unique. If your first name is Sam and you call yourself DJ Sam, there's a pretty high likelihood that there's another DJ Sam, and probably about 100 others. This might not be important if you're just starting out and playing locally but something to think about. If you do a Google search for "DJ Sam" it's pretty crowded... Something more specific is going to be easier to find if people are looking for you. Do you even want "DJ" in there?
You also don't want an angry DJ hitting you up for stealing his name. Do some research and throw a few potentials into Google. You also may want to think about any potential domain names if you're wanting to build a website.
The second consideration is how memorable and catchy your name is. You don't want something people have trouble pronouncing, understanding or that's overly complicated. Make sure it's snappy, isn't hard to spell right (unless your big time Trap Goth) and easy to remember.
You don't want to lose attention you because people are embarrassed to pronounce your name correctly or just have no idea altogether. You also want to make it easy to spell - if your name is DJ THOM, you might be losing a bit of traffic to DJ TOM.
Lastly, you want it to be something you like - it's going to be you for a long time if you take DJing seriously. In some cases, you might start to be known as this name more than your real name... Think about people calling you this name 10 years from now! Probably a good idea to just take your time and let the perfect name come to you :) Ask your friends!
Or, you could always try out one of the 50 "DJ NAME GENERATORS" available online for something lolzy.