How To Use Livestreaming To Get Noticed As A DJ

Everyone, it seems, is livestreaming their DJ sets nowadays. It is not a fad, and it is not going away. The recent Tomorrowland virtual festival reportedly banked $10 million. Livestreaming your sets is now an accepted part of what DJs do, and a valuable activity for any DJ who wants to get ahead, get noticed, and succeed.

Whether you’re using it as a means of creative expression, or to keep you busy when there are few or no gigs, or as a promotional tool to help you to get more gigs, it is definitely something worth doing.

But there is a world of difference between propping up a phone, hitting “Go Live” on an app, and DJing a dark, dingy, static, badly planned, boring DJ set – and putting on a well-produced, entertaining, interactive show that achieves what you want from it.

Read this next: How To DJ Livestream To Multiple Platforms With Restream

This article is not about the technical ins and outs of livestreaming (we cover that in an awful lot of detail in the article linked ed throughout this piece); rather, it is a guide to making sure that once you know how to do this, you make the most of the opportunity by planning it properly, promoting it well, performing to the best of your ability, then leveraging the livestream after the event.

There’s little point in putting all the time into making sure your livestream is worth watching, only to fail at making it work for you to get you noticed by promoters and venue managers, to get your name known among the artists and labels you love, and of course to increase your fanbase. That’s what this article will help you with.

Learn to livestream the right way: DJ Livestreaming Made Easy

How to do it

1. Plan your livestream strategy

Don’t just “go live” when you feel like it. That’s not going to get you what you want.

Think of a name for your livestream, and make artwork for each episode. Decide on a “music policy”, and put thought into where you’re going to source that music from. Decide on a frequency for your stream, and stick to the plan (consistency is everything).

Read this next: 8 Of The Best Apps For DJ Livestreaming On Mac, Windows, iOS & Android

People will only start to take you seriously when you show up every time, at the right time, doing what you said you’d be doing. Really what you’re doing here is building a personal brand, and brands need to stand for something, and your job is to continually reinforce that.

https://youtu.be/Z8R9-dYEwLo?rel=0
The above livestream was a tribute to Todd Terry, which our own Steve Canueto played in the Digital DJ Tips Sunday livestream slot. This set took many, many hours to plan and practise, but as part of the plan to launch our House Mixing Mastery course, it got us a lot of attention.

Launching a livestream is easy. Getting everything about it “right” so you are able to still be doing it months or years later is quite something else. So plan properly, before you commit the time and effort. It’s much easier to be honest with yourself about the time you’ve got and what you really want to do early on than to pivot (or give up) down the line.

2. Promote your livestreams properly

Every channel you’ve got, you need to use to tell people you’re going live. I like the “one week, one day, one hour” tactic, which means let people know about it at those three time intervals beforehand.

Tell everyone on your DJ email list. (You don’t have one? Start one.) Tell people on your social channels (note, that doesn’t mean spamming everyone else’s with the info). Write about it on your website, if you have one. And of course, let everyone in your friends and family know you’re live.

Read this next: How To Livestream DJ Sets: 4 Ways To Do It

It’s worth considering actually streaming to as many platforms as you can, too. Now, the big elephant in the room with livestreaming is copyright (but mark our works, that is simply the legalities lagging behind the tech – a solution for all platforms is coming).

Nonetheless, at the time of writing you can stream on Mixcloud Live without issue, YouTube is usually OK, and Twitch doesn’t seem to be enforcing the rules massively either. We’d say try YouTube and Mixcloud Live as a minimum – the more places you can be, the more people are likely to discover you.

3. Put in a professional performance

This is a showcase for your skills, so do yourself justice. Here are some guidelines:

• Plan your whole set – you don’t want to be trying to figure out what to play next when you’re also handling the technicalities of livestreaming and trying to engage with your audience comments and chats
• Make sure your stream looks awesome – it has to be visually engaging, so put some thought into this. Always make sure there is movement of any kind in shot – static livestreams are a no-no and won’t ever work
• Make it fun, entertaining and engaging – The reason you’re live is that people are with you in real time, which is awesome! So smile about it, show that you’re thrilled, and engage with your audience. This is entertainment, you’ve been given the full attention of people who clicked on your stream, so make it worth their while being there
• Ask for shares, follow and likes – You’re doing this for free, and you’ve put a lot of time into making it as good as you can, so ask for something in return. People won’t do it unless you ask, so make sure you do
• Always watch back and figure out how to improve – Some people love watching their streams back, others hate it – but you must. It’s the best way to spot things you’ll do differently the next time, and vital if you want to improve and so make a success of your DJ livestreaming

4. Leverage your stream recordings

Think about it – even if you manage to livestream an hour a week, that is still six days and 23 hours of every week you are NOT livestreaming – over 99% of the time. Make that other 99% work for you!

[mixcloud https://www.mixcloud.com/philmorse/balcony-beats-13/ width=100% height=120 hide_cover=1]
If you upload audio versions of your livestreams to Mixcloud, you can have widgets like the one above, that lets you embed them on websites. You also get share links for socials – it’s a great way to get people to listen after the event.

So to best leverage your livestreams, consider doing some of these things:

• Add an audio version of your livestream to Mixcloud (consider recording it separately, minus the chat from the broadcast). do this, and effectively you’re building up a body of mixtapes as well as livestreaming.
• Make playlists on Spotify. It’s easy to do and again, it’s great publicity for the livestream itself – plus it gives you something to listen to, as well!
• Make sure you push people to a YouTube video version of it, and make a nice thumbnail so the YouTube version looks good – and of course, in the YouTube description, you’ll advertise your stream.
• Write about the tracks you’ve used, and share wherever you publish stuff (socials, Mixcloud Articles, YouTube Community, Medium). Share with the artists and labels you features, and follow them on social.

Doing things such as I’ve suggested above is added value for your viewers (be sure to tell them about it when you’re live), and done right, it can get you shares from the artists, as well as even free music from them.

Remember…

This is something you need to do if you’re going to take livestreaming seriously, but you don’t need to do it all at once.

As an example, I do a show every two weeks, Balcony Beats. It’s on Sundays at 5pm London (11am Eastern). It broadcasts on the Digital DJ Tips YouTube and Mixcloud Live channels (you can also hear the audio versions on my personal Mixcloud)

https://youtu.be/AhuFsmwiZNE?rel=0
This is one of my fortnightly “Balcony Beats” sets, which got their name because originally I was performing them under full lockdown and so had to do them from my balcony!

It is nearly all new music, so I need to find time to discover an hour of great tunes to play for each set. To source the music, plan the set, record the Mixcloud version, practise the livestream, set up, perform, break down, post the track listing, and handle comments and other admin takes about eight hours, for a 60-minute stream.

Read this next: The Ultimate Guide To DJ Livestreaming

I probably do about half of what I suggest above – but I am always looking for ways to add in the other things and to improve as I go along, while keeping in mind this is effectively a hobby for me, alongside my “day job” as Digital DJ Tips founder and tutor.

The important thing is consistency. Commit to what you can do and would enjoy doing, and then start to weave in some of the other ideas when you’re ready. And good luck – right now, getting this right is one of the smartest things you can do to get noticed as a DJ.