You might have noticed it, but for much of 2025 I took a bit of a mental health break from DJing. There was just too much shit going on in my life and I felt like setting everything up in my smaller-than-a-prison-cell bedroom, even if it’s just to play a set for myself without livestreaming it, was just not worth the hassle.

When I returned to DJing earlier this year, my sabbatical had lead to one minor problem: A lack of new music.

I still have a few folders of yet unpacked tunes that I downloaded from the DJ Pool of my choice before I said „fuck all that“, but I don’t know, man. Turns out I still am not fully mentally there to do all of the DJ chores.

So all the sets that I did this year so far, as well as at least the next few, suffered from a lack of new music. Except that they didn’t suffer at all. At least if you ask me.

You see, first I wasn’t too happy about it either. I felt like I should look for some new music first before I get back in the booth, but with my current financial situation, that wasn’t much of an option. (Seriously, GIMME MONEY!) Mostly I was worried that I would bore everybody with the same, worn out music and get overwhelmed by the urge to play only the hits and anthems.

But I have to pat myself a little on the back here. As it turns out, I have curated a good music collection, full of tunes that are great, but not always overplayed.

Before I went full digital in 2010, I DJ’d with CDs and had (and still have) a pretty big collection. But once I started getting my music Beatport & Co plus some DJ pools it grew a lot. And a big collection can be dangerous.

What I’m trying to say here is that it really showed me the value of a good music collection.

A long time ago I realized that the perfect music collection for DJing purposes should be as big as possible, but also as small as possible. Having 50 million tracks on your hard drive can be overwhelming, so do a regular spring cleaning. Get rid of the tracks that were fine a few years ago but now don’t really work anymore for whatever reason. The ones that you bought after listening to a snippet on Beatport, only to realize that this snippet was indeed the best part of it. Shit, even the ones that are maybe „just“ okay instead of great!

Choose wisely, but be merciless. (And if you don’t wanna delete anything, you can still just move them to another hard drive or into the cloud.)

And now that you have a big, but also small-as-possible collection, you are ready to play a bunch of sets without any (or with very little) new music. As I mentioned in the beginning, I was worried that I would just play the same old stuff that I often play. That every new set would sound like an old one, but with a slightly mixed up playlist. But no, I not just had a lot of fun digging in my digital crates and rediscovering old bangers, I’m sure most listeners didn’t even noticed that the music was old, safe for the occasional hit of yesteryear or dancefloor anthem. Because, sorry for another self-congratulating pat on the back, so much of my music does NOT consist of hits and dancefloor anthems.

No, don’t worry, I won’t start calling myself and one of the most popular music genres in the world uNdErGrOuNd, just because David Guetta never played the same tracks at Tomorrowland as I did in my bedroom. But yeah, if you believe that your playlist must consist of hits only, you really should reconsider your approach to crate digging. I have to point out again that one of the biggest surprises for myself was the rediscovery of so many tracks that I more or less forgot about. And of course your favourite banger from 10 years ago will be fresh for someone else. Good music has no expiration date.

Next time I will write about those days when you think you have an interesting topic to talk about, but then struggle to write more than a few sentences because as it turned out, there isn’t that much to say about it.