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Comment by bittersweet | Hacker News Reader

I've experienced this a lot while going to Dubstep parties, there are a lot of DJs that indeed have those special ocassion records laying around.

First party I went to a DJ called Skream played a track, later I found out it's one that he would never release and has a bit of a legendary status on the boards etc surrounding Dubstep. It was indeed amazing to experience it.

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It should be noted that some of the time this is because the tracks in question have a massive, unclearable sample from a major label artist.

Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RJy2-F2irA

It pains me that I will likely never get to own this record. However I have already paid to go and see someone who played it, and this was certainly part of my decision to do so. They've probably made more money off me from that than they would have if I bought the flac.

EDIT: research shows that this track is now in fact coming out. Rave music has two solutions to the problem of unclearable samples: the classic, unlabelled vinyl sold direct to shops out the back of a car, and the more modern free download leaked to twitter. The former is dying out unfortunately.

Yes of course some of it is because of clearance issues but this track is not coming out on purpose. You can find it here if you are interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbSUhryvC3Q

I agree, whitelabels are the best! I have a couple of great tracks on whitelabels.

"However I have already paid to go and see someone who played it, and this was certainly part of my decision to do so. They've probably made more money off me from that than they would have if I bought the flac."

Who's the "they" there? The DJ who played the track or the artist who produced it? Sometimes it seems that in electronic music DJs get more attention/credit/$ than the artists who made the tracks being played. (although I know some DJs are also producers as well, I think they're the exception to the rule)

Could be both, often it would be a DJ who is on the same label or part of the same crew as the producer who wrote the tracks. Often these people share studios, so there is a direct monetary link there.

There are almost no DJs who aren't producers. The few that are only DJs either have some special and unique facet to their style of mixing, or they date back to the early days when Things were Different.

Wow great track. Thanks.

this is available on emusic.com

This may be partly due to the infamous "dubplate culture" intrinsic to the Drum n' Bass scene, and later the Dubstep scene. Back in the late 90s it wasn't uncommon for certain gigantic tracks to exist as exclusive dubplates given to only top-name DJs for a couple of years before their eventual release... tracks like Bad Company's "The Nine" being a prime example (Prototype was a label notorious for this kind of hype-building tactic).

These days, the tools and techniques of DJing have been largely demystified, so DJs and producers trade in a currency of unreleased tracks, otherwise there's precious little to differentiate their sets from those played by any number of technically qualified local DJs.

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