unpaused
This mix session came from a little project to test out Beatport Mixes. As Beatport Mixes is now long gone (that went well), here is a little summary of how it worked. Essentially it was a service to host mixes and offer them for sale. It got around the licensing loophole for commercial availability by mandating that the creator had purchased all said music from Beatport to make the mix with. In theory, everybody is a winner. Beatport earn, the labels and artists earn, the DJ potentially earns and there is a whole load of free advertising and content to go around. To see if it was vaguely possible to make a crust from mixes uploaded to their platform, I gave it a try.
There were a few hurdles to overcome with the session. First was track selection. As someone who receives a lot of promos and digital copies of vinyl only releases, it suddenly transpired that many brick walls appeared as I went to slide in tracks that were not available in the Beatport catalogue for my mix. Second was material costs. I chose WAVs to mix from, with the principle that I should be offering prospective purchasers the best quality product for their money. Buying the tracks for this mix from Beatport cost £32 in the end. While that is a piddly amount in terms of license costs, it is quite the outlay if you're just looking to bang out a session to use on a service.
Over a few weeks of arranging and some particularly hard fought EQ sessions, I created 'unpaused'. At the time, I had just emerged from a particularly toxic relationship and had landed in a much more enriching one with my current lovely. My life was unpaused. I quickly cobbled some artwork together--it is an edited photo of my Christmas tree decorations--and uploaded the mix. After a month, I think I made about £5.20 in sales of the mix, which put my at negative £26.80 in terms of reward!
Naturally, there are now many more options for DJs that don't tie them to a restrictive ecosystem. Blockchain is pushing at the boundaries and grey areas, while direct rewards through Patreon and Ko-Fi offer income options. Beatport Mixes was an expensive failed experiment which resulted in its demise.
On to the mix. It is surprisingly vocal for me, I'm very 'tracky' nowadays, earthen and dusty. The execution is incredibly slick though. Yeah, that sounds like I'm bigging myself up a little, but I got the transitions absolutely bang on here and some of the blends make my mind tingle. If you don't love what you are doing, why are you doing it? Highlights are the way the acid outro of My Favourite Robot's Tears For Fears cover melting into Sistema's remix of Ricardo Tobar. The way Kink's remix of Rachel Row fades away as I gradually re-edit the vocal stutters into a filtered echo delay. The large amount of layering between Monoloc & Daniel Wilde and The XX which lifts the actually quite ploddy "It's Mine" into much more airy territories. Then there are the huge EQ battles I had in order to get massive layered blends between Club Bizarre and Rick Grant, Nyra and Dave Aju, plus Martyn and Pachanga Boys to mesh. The latter in particular took so many passes of EQ tweaking and editing to get right. So many.
It was all worth it in the end, as you'll find out when you listen. If your face is not on the ceiling as "Time" takes hold, then you are dead inside.
TRACKLIST
0:00 James Curd, Morgan Phalen - Making It All-right [Greenskeepers Music]
3:52 My Favorite Robot, Silky - Shout [My Favorite Robot Records]
8:23 Ricardo Tobar - Jamaica Sun (Sistema Sunset Dub) [Natura Sonoris]
13:19 Christopher Rau - Weird Alps [ Smallville Records]
16:14 Rachel Row - Follow The Step (KiNK Mix) [Defected]
20:29 Christian Prommer, Alex Barck - Sleeping Beauty (Broken Reform Remix) [Derwin Recordings]
24:51 Chamboche - Smoke Screen (Bicep Remix) [Under The Shade]
28:02 Jacques Greene - Clark [VASE]
32:17 Monoloc, Daniel Wilde - It's Mine [CLR]
36:32 The XX - Chained (John Talabot and Pional Blinded Remix) [Young Turks]
42:37 Club Bizarre - La mort du petit cheval [Days Of Being Wild]
49:15 Rick Grant - Crossing (Mr Lager Remix) [Take Records]
54:17 Nyra - Dres Doneres Done [Elastic Dreams]
57:20 Dave Aju - Away Away (Axel Boman Remix) [Circus Company]
1:01:19 Dana Ruh - Nebouxi [Brouqade]
1:04:14 Martyn - We Are You in the Future (Redshape Remix) [Brainfeeder]
1:12:27 Pachanga Boys - Time [Hippie Dance]
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