Which service is best for DJs: SoundCloud, YouTube or Spotify?

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RemixRotation

4 min readMar 1, 2017

I have analyzed 430,000 search results to determine the best streaming service for each of the 24 main electronic music genres…

Do you download tracks to mix them using software like NI Traktor or Serato?

Do you do the right thing and pay for these downloads on Beatport, JunoDownload or Traxsource?

I hate it when I accidentally buy boring music, just because the 2min preview sounded more exciting that the actual track — does it ever happen to you?

Fortunately, many labels and producers upload full length promotional copies: SoundCloud, YouTube and Spotify are great sources to hear full length tracks before we pay for downloads.

Since my professional background is in IT and software development I built a search engine using Java, to help me determine:

Which streaming services is best for each of the 24 main electronic music genres: SoundCloud, YouTube or Spotify?

My findings are that Spotify is the best overall streaming source for electronic music.

I analyzed (all) 10,956 tracks charted during Feb 2017:

5,153 tracks from Beatport Top 100 (in 21 genres)
+ 3,337 tracks from JunoDownload Top 100 (in 21 genres)
+ 3,260 tracks from Traxsource Top 100 (in 12 genres)

Some tracks appeared in multiple charts:

Feb 28: “Chemistry” and “Driven” are in Techno Top 100 charts on Beatport, JunoDownload and Traxsource

Your BPM counter ain’t got nothing on

my AWS server which ran a total of 45,857 API searches, then did cleanup and normalization of 253,227 results from YouTube, with 151,293 results from SoundCloud and another 26,907 results coming from Spotify. That’s a total of 431,427 search results — thank you very much!

Each of these search results is similar to this Spotify API page. YouTube and SoundCloud have a lot more content that looks “alike” because they have duplicates uploaded by multiple users and various bootlegs, mixes videos etc.

These were the final track search statistics on Feb 28, 2017:

My own music service RemixRotation.com

is a simple-to-use music player. Genre playlists are updated each day with both YouTube AND SoundCloud media for the ~11,000 top tracks that DJs have been buying during the past 31 days. View it on your desktops and laptops to use our integration with Spotify. Here is the extended comparison for the same 10,956 tracks charted during Feb 2017:

If you buy downloads, the best thing about RemixRotation playlists is that each track is available for download right now — just follow its “buy” link. Fans can add their favorite tracks to playlists in their Spotify accounts — see the “Add on Spotify” links on the right hand side.

Although our elders might “feel”

that it all sounds the same, electronic music is very diverse and most us strongly prefer just a handful of individual genres. Personally, I enjoy Techno, but when I am asked about Dubstep, my sentiment is that I do support it and also that I don’t like it much at all. Another person might love Future House and yet, they could be “annoyed” by Breakbeat. It turns out that I can use Spotify to hear most of the best techno:

http://remixrotation.com/charts/techno.html

Music fans interested in Future House, can focus on YouTube instead:

http://remixrotation.com/charts/future-house.html

Specifically, Spotify is the best source for :

YouTube is your best “friend” before you buy:

Of course, I hope that you are already cranking these tracks to +11.

And if you were intrigued by recent news that both Spotify and Google considered acquiring SoundCloud, I recommend my “what-if” analysis based on this same dataset.

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