The Lowdown
A free online tool that draws on a database of over 40 million songs to offer you key, BPM and other information, plus recommendations for harmonic mixing. It is clean and functional, although there is no way of turning off the ads, and some of the ratings it shares for songs like “danceability” and “happiness” are probably of limited use.
First Impressions / Setting up
Tunebat was started to solve a problem the founder, Oliver Reznik, himself ran into. As an aspiring producer with a love for EDM and an interest in adding DJing to his skills, he decided to make a mixtape. When he was looking for tracks to fit well together harmonically that he didn’t yet own, he found it hard to get the right information for the tracks he had in mind.
So in 2017, he launched Tunebat, a website that takes Spotify’s metadata (over 40 million tracks) and displays it in a DJ-friendly format. As of today, the site claims over a million monthly views, so it seems having access to a database of BPM, key , and other info about the world’s music is something a few others have found useful, too!
This is a web app, so you just go to the clean, simple site and you’re ready to go. Basic use is straightforward. On arrival, you see a “Top 100”- list as an appetiser. It shows you the first 25 tracks from the Billboard 100 list. You can instantly see the classic and Camelot key notation values, as well as the BPM for each track. A Play button lets you listen to the track.
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Click on the Spotify logo, and you get taken directly to the track there, but click on the track itself, and you get a new Tunebat page featuring all kinds of information about the track. Next to the two key values and BPM, you will find calculations of “energy”, “danceability” and “happiness”, as well as a release date, whether it’s an album or single, if it’s explicit, and the label it was released on.
So far so good, but let’s look at how you can start using this functionality to help in your DJing.
In Use
Using Tunebat as a discovery tool is really what this is all about, and here is where it comes into play. Underneath this block of information you will find a number (15+) of tracks that will fit well harmonically with the track you picked. A nice touch is that if you scroll down the list, the original track information stays on top for easy comparison. The same Play and Spotify buttons are found here too, so you can quickly listen to the track to see what it is. One column that I found useful is “Popularity” to determine if many people like the track.
If you are looking for something specific, you can enter a track or artist name in the search field on top and select the track you want/need and then have all the same information about that track complete with the harmonic and non-harmonic suggestions.
There are two extra features in the top bar next to the search field. The first is the “advanced” option. This takes you to the page where you can fine-tune a search. You can select up to five “seed tracks” to help Tunebat recommend more suitable tracks for you. Seeds can be either tracks or artists. You will receive 50 recommendations, and these can be very random. To further detail your search you can set match values, ranges and such. It is fun to play around with this feature and see what it comes up with.
The second extra feature is the “Key & BPM Finder”. It lets you upload a track in one of the supported file formats, with a maximum size of 75MB (either browse or drag & drop). In a couple of seconds you get the classical and Camelot keys and BPM. Useful as quick check if for some reason your DJ software doesn’t easily show you this info for any given track. The tracks are removed after analysis. You could also use it for a “second opinion”, for example, with tracks where you have doubts, though.
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There is one more button marked “Music Video Maker”. Clicking it will take you to the developer’s other product, the Specterr music video tool. It aims to help producers turn their tracks into visually appealing music videos instead of just plain old audio files. Worth a look if you are into producing your own music.
Tunebat has an ad-based business model. This means there is no subscription option and no other way to (pay to) get rid of any ads you get presented with. On the flipside, that does mean that using the site is free.
Conclusion
Key shifting has become so good these days that you can technically make any track key-compatible with any other, both by keeping quality audio through extreme BPM changes and through key shifting (check out our Fuzzy Keymixing method for the best way to do this.) Plus, DJ software gets you key and BPM information automatically in most cases. And also, I am not sure of the value for DJs of algorithmically calculated things like “happiness” and “danceability”.
Read this next: Fuzzy Keymixing: The Easy New Way To Mix Anything Into Anything
So is there still a use for a service like Tunebat? Personally I think there is. Firstly, it offers a lot of information without having to add tracks to your collection or run them through your workflow first, but also many sites (DJ pools, online music shops, Spotify itself) will build up a profile and use algorithms that narrow the suggestions you get.
Because your personal preferences don’t enter into it when you use Tunebat, you are more likely to get presented with a broader range of suggestions, making it a good way to either do a general music discovery exercise or a more specific one based on seeds and narrowed down criteria if you are looking for a new track that goes well with one of your favourites.
(Plus, if you’re having a “guilty pleasures” session, it won’t taint your Spotify algorithm!)
As Tunebat is free and online, it’s simple enough to check it for yourself and figure out if you think it might be useful for you.
