Pulselocker is here!!
The term 'game-changer' often gets branded about, with it turning to out be nothing but a 'splash in the pan' and a distant memory of all the other fad, cool ideas that failed.... (I was going to mention a few, but Im feeling all positive, so Im not going there ;) ). I honestly think that this is the way forward, not so much where it'll change peoples habits completely, but it certainly does give djs a hell of a great way to play their music. See, now there's the thing, it'll not be your music entirely, but we'll get to that.
So what's Pulselocker? Well its a streaming service but a million times better. As soon as I heard it was a streaming service I kind of switched off, as I personally would never trust streaming a whole set in a nightclub - its just asking for trouble currently. But then a few words quickly snapped my attention back in the room... 44 million tracks available so far.... underground labels.... save tracks in crates to use offline.... What? Really? Yes... Amazing right? Thats not it... There's more! Lets take a look at the main features.
So yeah, 44 million tracks so far on the catalogue, with more and more labels signing up by the day, as they can obviously see the potential in this. The labels that are on there so far have surprised me, not only do you get the obvious ones, but the guys and girls that are behind some of the biggest underground tracks out there that are currently rumbling the sweat dripping, black walls of Berlin.... uuutzz, uuutzz, uuutzz, uuutzz...
The genres also range from leftfield to hip hop, 80's pop classics to underground house and so on. So you know when you're playing a house set and some random 50 year old man comes up to you and says "mate, dj, yo.... (still thinking he's down with the cool kids) can you play some rock music... everyone in here wants to hear it.... (like he's gone round and actually took a survey)". Now depending what type of dj you are, or should I say, what character you are, you can either 1) tell him which road to go and play on 2) amuse him until he forgets what he's talking you for, or 3) say that you havent got it... Well, lets just hope he doesnt know that you are using Pulselocker, as you can literally play it within seconds as long as youre connected to Wifi... Oh and Im all for switching up the sets, but if you ever do that, "have a word"... it was just easy to use that for an example! :) The track is then saved to your play list for you to use again whilst offline. You literally just go into the 'search' tab and it'll be there, you dont have to come out of Serato for example.
Another beauty of this, is that you can mix and match your tracks too with files youve already purchased, so if you have tracks from iTunes, Traxsource, Beatport, Juno etc, you can still save these Pulselocker tracks in the same playlists... But obviously, you can not record these files... and if you dont think thats obvious... get out! In theory, you could save the whole entire catalogue so that you can use it offline, but I very much doubt your laptop would like you for doing that. Now speaking of hard drives... lets say that you download all of the tracks on your home computer but you use a different laptop to dj out on, it's all saved on your account, so as long as you log in and out, the music will follow you.... Also meaning, you could turn up at a friends house and dj on their equipment, using your log in and the music you have saved will be there!
Pulselocker costs £14.99 a month for the service, which is nothing if you are anything like me and buy near £100 a month on tracks that i play once. One thing to note, is that if you are sharing your log in details, like some do, just be aware that you can only use one device at once... so dont get caught short and start going into meltdown 2 minutes before your set starts.
Pulselocker is currently available for Serato DJ, DEX, Future DJ Pro... but I can see the other big boys trying to get on board too... but in the meantime, I have to say and im sure they would agree behind closed doors, Serato has been falling behind of late, but this well and truly throws them back into the mix with the likes of Rekordbox DJ and Traktor.
Now the only drawback I can see with this that someone may say, and it something that is very relative to the person - if you solely used this service for 10 years, thats 10 years of music that you'd never own. I do get that and thinking about it, do I really look through the tens of thousands of tracks that I own? Well, no... I simply dont have the time... Therefore, for me... This is a GAME-CHANGER!
So if this is something that you potentially get into... Download the latest version of Serato and click here to start your 14 day free trial.