DJ Laurent Garnier listens to over 1,000 songs a day

As the need to curate content and be on the cutting edge of art to attract fans, many DJs and producers are forced to spend much of their time working on projects and activities beyond creating and performing. In a recent interview, DJ Laurent Garnier revealed his exhausting practices for curating new tracks for his own sets.

While it comes as no surprise to fellow DJs that curating new music for mix shows, radio shows, and live events is a busy job in and of itself, during a recent keynote event at London’s AVA. DJ Laurent Garnier revealed a startling commitment to his search for new releases. During his conversation with writer Séamas O’Reilly, the French revealed that he listens to approximately 500 EPs per day in his quest to find new music. He revealed this incredible number while discussing the vast number of uploads to Spotify each day and his need to do his own research:

“I skip through 500 Different EPs a day, which makes it about 1,000, 1,500 tracks. I do, because I want to know what’s going on. When we DJ, we should try to play the best music that is out and there is a lot of music – a hell of a lot of music. On Spotify, there are between 100,000 and 200,000 tracks a day. So, listening to 500 records is nothing. I basically know nothing about what’s going on but I’m trying to know a little bit. My job is to search for music.”

In justifying the extensive work, Laurent Garnier notes that he uses the tracks he downloads for his own live sets, his PBB radio show and the rest go to his [DEEP]Search radio show. He further speaks about the need for human curation as he trusts himself more than the algorithms that these programs utilize to direct content to listeners:

“I believe human curating is still more important than what the machines or the the algorithm is proposing to me,” he said. “I’m not happy with the algorithms, so I have to do it myself. The funny thing is, I do find amazing records every day – really, really good stuff.”

Garnier of course stated that he doesn’t download too much of what he streams but did reveal that he had upwards of 70 tracks he had to sort through over the previous 24 hours. His story is a great reminder of the effort and energy that many DJs and producers put forth in creating content across a variety of platforms.