

That began with the Expedit, a bookcase with square cubby holes that happened to be a perfect fit for 12″ vinyl. One not-so-secret source for storage amongst DJs, though, is Ikea. There are a lot of options available for storing records and some units can be pricey. Find the right storage for your collection. You’ve invested money and time into your music collection, so it’s time to organize, or re-organize, what you have. “All of a sudden, I started listening to stuff I hadn’t played in a while and I started to really listen to records,” says Gomez. During the pandemic, he rearranged his music alphabetically. However, he noticed that his system was “so specific” that he wasn’t listening to chunks of the records he owned.

If you find yourself spending too much time trying to figure out which album goes where, you might want to stick to more general categories, or even use decades as a guideline.ĭavid Gomez, aka Gomez Comes Alive, had his music organized by genre, which came in handy when he was DJing at a variety of Los Angeles parties.

Genre does get complicated if your collection is eclectic. If you’ve hung on to every mixtape or CD that your friends have given you since middle school, organizing those by genre, or perhaps even era, could make them easier to locate. Within each band’s section, she arranges the records chronologically.Īt home, genre can work well for various formats of music. This is a system that she says helps her pull music for her DJ sets. That could mean that the bands are part of the same family tree or ones with a similar sound. “Who I expect to see next to each other,” she explains. Instead of alphabetizing the bands within a given section, she’ll group together bands based on the various connections between artists. The benefit of doing this is that you will only need to comb through a few stashes within the collection when preparing for a gig, rather than digging in every single crate to find the songs they need for the night.Ĭhino-based DJ Muezette takes her genre organization one step further. Of the four DJs interviewed for this story, all have had their collections organized by genre at some point in their careers. Whether they spin vinyl or carry all their jams on flash drives, DJs will often devise systems that work best for them. There’s no one method that DJs use to organize their music. To help you get started, we turned to local DJs for their tips on keeping music collections tidy. If you have, it’s time to organize, or re-organize, what you have. Between a hefty amount of new digital releases in recent months and vintage vinyl sales online, maybe you’ve invested money and time into your own music collection since the COVID-19 pandemic started. Even after a year without concerts or clubs, music hasn’t stopped.
