What percentage of your subscription music do you actually use?

I get about 20-22 songs a week on my subscription and most of it I will NEVER use. I listen to every CD when ripping it just to see what's there.
Sometimes a year or sometimes a lot more than a year later I'll get a request either by a bride, or at an event for a song I forgot about. I'm happy I have it. Sometimes it's a new song that I don't remember having, but I'll-be-darned there's the song they requested right there and it makes the moment at the event.

Speaking unbiased, most will probably use a very small percentage from your weekly music service. Why? Well, if you're DJing 1-2 times a week, at 4 hours per event, that's about 120 songs. How many thousands of songs do you have in your library? There just simply isn't enough time.

So then why do DJs get subscriptions? To stay on top of the music without having to do all kinds of research. You could spend at least 2-3 hours a week looking at charts, downloading music, etc. or you could be working on booking more events. If you pay $50 a month for your music subscription, you save at least 12 hours a month. Is your time worth more than $4 an hour? I think so.

I know Papa's more talking from the standpoint of 'wasted' money by buying songs you never think you'll use, but as a DJ I don't look at any song I bought as wasted. I just look at them as tools in my arsenal. I hate telling someone I don't have a song. At least if someone requests a song then I have the ability to decide if I want to play it.

As far as flash in the pan songs, I think we're going to see that more & more. iTunes, YouTube and other new media formats are making songs get hot really fast, and just as fast as they got hot, they're gone.

I feel the same way.
Some of the music on the discs are songs that I don't get good response from.

I no longer subscribe to CD services. When I need songs, I just go to ITunes or other services & buy the ones I need. All my music is digital.

Sounds To Go said:

I've finished my library conversion to digital, and because I am going to be carrying my discs with me as back-up , and just in general anyway as well, I want to maintain a current working library on disc, but I did convert from one big-assed heavy case down to two smaller ones and I purged a bunch of discs from my cases that I have never once touched in my 5 years of dj'ing so far.

Nice to know I have access to them digitally now in case of the "Big IF," but I'm just going to err on the side of experience-to-date in deciding that I can safely remove them from my gigging disc library.

I remember someone on here a long time ago saying they condensed their subscriptions down to the most played/popular out of each year and paired down the number of discs that way, and I may do that somewhere down the road as well. It'd be nice to be able to reduce the two cd cases I'll *still* be carrying down to one Case-Logic CD book!

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Have you thought of going a similar but different route. Instead of bringing all those CDs with you still. Buy a CD player capable of using mp3 discs and you can make the CDs you bring even fewer but still have the back up of them.

I used to subscribe to promo only , but now subcribe only to a British series called Mastermix & an Australian series called radio active. Both are quite good but often i have already obtained some tracks that shows up on these cds before they arrive , out of necessity.Waiting a whole month to get a hot song is just not practical.