CD Release Tuesday

As you probably know, in the interest of furthering my DJ career potential, I buy a new dance-related CD every week. Over time though, the selection at Best Buy (or other record stores) grew thin, so I started turning to iTunes, which to my surprise happens to have a large release of new dance music every week. This release date coincides with standard record releases on Tuesdays, so on Wednesdays (after all the new albums have been added to iTunes the day before), I scour the iTunes store for everything I can find, hoping to fall in love with some new tracks to spin.

But the tracks I initially like don't automatically make it to the purchasing stage...no, I try my best to find each one on some sort of website to make sure the 30 seconds I heard of the track on iTunes is in fact representative of the whole thing. Some of the best sites I use to hear these full tracks are:

YouTube, imeem, Hype Machine, and Rhapsody

This pruning process ends up cutting out the vast majority of stuff I am initially attracted to, which is good because otherwise I would end up with a bunch of tracks I'm not going to end up spinning. Even still, sometimes I'll buy a track that I thought I liked and end up changing my mind, but usually my personally-picked CDs are more consistently good than just picking up an artist featured-length or mix CD at the store. Still, there's something to be said for the immediacy of buying a CD at a store, because this whole process of finding new music on iTunes can take many hours over a few weeks...