Interview with one of the founders of zipDJ a Music download site for the PRO DJ

0:00 Would you like to introduce yourself sir?

Alright guys, I have one of the CEOs and co-founders of a great downloading website called ZipDJ. Would you like to introduce yourself sir? Sure, how are you doing man? Thanks Jonathan for having me man. We're a fan of your Ellaskins channel. Thank you. And we appreciate you supporting the scene and music. And similar to us, I've got a huge passion for music man. That's it, the passion. It's myself, essentially ZipDJ is myself and my partner. I'm Nick Fiorucci and my partner is Kevin Unger. We've both been in the business forever. I'm a DJ and producer first and foremost, also run a label called High Bias Records which we've now this year celebrating 25 years so I'm pretty pleased about that. Can I just say, that is pretty good for a record label because they don't normally last long, you know? Yeah, for real. It really is a feat and we're really excited that we've made it this long and still thriving. So knock on wood and things are going well. Again, it's about our passion, right? It's the passion for the music and what we do. It's not work. We love what we do. And Zip DJ essentially was born out of...

The DJ Tutor was born as a delivery tool for getting our promotional music to DJs. The turning point of the music business where mp3s and digital files were becoming popular and physical goods were going out the window. Basically, we stopped manufacturing vinyl and CDs. There was really no more market anymore for it. So we're figuring out what am I going to do? How am I going to get my promos into the hands of DJs? My partner Kevin comes from Sony Music and he ran the dance department there. Is this the dance department in the US? No, actually in Canada. Oh sorry, I beg your pardon. So it was Sony Music Canada but he worked in conjunction with the, it was called Sony Dance Department which was kind of a world organisation and so together with Sony and the major labels in Canada we developed this tool that was originally called Music Cab where he had actually developed it called Music Cab and it was a...

2:35 Music cab, delivery of music basically for digital files

Music cab, delivery of music basically for digital files. And back then there was digital rights management and all this stuff that was part of the system. And me coming from a music production background and DJ background and a label background, I saw the future and I said to Kevin, I said look we've got to build an engine here that's got less of the... All the technical things like the digital rights management where you couldn't share files on. DJs want to get files and the bottom line is if DJs are getting... Music and they're supporting the music that it's reaching the masses and that's really what Zip DJ is about. It's a promotional website. We get music from over 1,700 labels worldwide and all the major labels and all the main independent labels from and we carry all genres as well from dance and house and urban and R&B you know like hip-hop reggae all that stuff so

So I'm going to give you a little tour, a quick tour on the site and show you some of the main features and tell you a little bit more as we log in here. So I'm going to stop this. Okay, well while you're clicking away, if you can tell me, am I right in saying that anyone can join ZipDJ? It's not just for DJs is it? Actually, no. It's not at all. In fact, it is only professional DJs that can join ZipDJ. Ah, right. Okay. Basically, we act as a liaison between labels for their promotional music and reaching to the hands of DJs. We definitely vet all the DJs that come through, all the people that register. We make sure that they are in fact working DJs. And absolutely, we definitely don't allow the general population into their website. Okay, thank you partner. Yeah, because it's not fair to the labels because we're delivering their promotional music a lot of times in advance of record shops and so forth.

5:19 These charts are compiled by the DJs themselves

As labels give the music to DJs, the DJs are hopefully supporting it, playing it at their gigs, in their shows or on their radio shows, and it reaches a bigger audience which will ideally increase their sales. And that's where we're at with the idea of the site. So can you see my screen here? Awesome. And I see your video here. So I'm going to just give you a little tour. I'm going to log in. So this is basically the homepage. There's not really much to the homepage. We do show some of the charts that we offer of some of the music. Now these charts are compiled by the DJs themselves. Once every week when they log in, they have the option to enter the top 10 playlist. Can I just stop you one second? Sure. This is, as you know, my videos are very punk.

Carry on because I'm going to keep the camera rolling, but I've got my little boy just in the other room. I've just got to check, make sure he's okay, but I will be back in like a few seconds, okay? But carry on, please. You want me to keep rolling? Yeah, you keep rolling, keep rolling. Okay, awesome. So as I was saying, the Zip DJ charts at the front in the public side are just basically a top 40 snapshot of the music that our DJs are selecting and it's really made up of their top 10s I'm back, sorry about that. I'm back, yeah. Luckily we can't see your login details. For the files, really important. We have our files all watermarked. We only offer downloads of the files once. So you can't share, even if you share your logins, you can't download the same file more than once. And we also have an IP checking system. So if you're a registered DJ that's in the UK and all of a sudden somebody from US is logging in, we get a flag going, what's going on, right? Or multiple IPs. So like I said, we take it pretty serious.

7:16 You can see the inside right now?

Good. So you can see the inside right now? Yeah, I've got it, yeah. It's good on the screen as well. Carry on. Awesome. Okay, so this is what DJs see when they log in. This middle section here is the new release section and this is really based on what is added with the newest thing on top and just really by date, so what's been added. So basically DJs... They can hit the play button and preview the songs really quickly. Yeah. As you can see, it's very, very fast and they can go through the tracks. And so if they like the song, it's as simple as adding the, you know, clicking the download button and then it goes into a thing called your download manager here on the right. And so as you notice, I'm all on one screen. I don't have to leave or turn pages. So I keep going through, you know, we've got hip hop, we've got whatever we have that's added to the site.

So I'm not going to go through, but you could actually, if you like, let's say, house music or you like, you know, deep house or indie dance or new disco, you just could sort by that genre. Yeah. You can go through those tracks on there. When you like the track, you click the blue button and it adds to your download manager. And it's that simple, really. You could sort by genre. The DJ Tutor is a great way to get started. Another really cool feature that we've added just recently is a thing called Zip DJ Packs. So what we found is with Zip DJ Packs, a lot of DJs are extremely busy. There's so much music being ingested every day, dozens of new tracks every day, hundreds weekly, that guys come in and they're overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that they're trying to get that's new. So what we've done is we started adding curated music.

9:37 Great idea, month

Great idea. That's a great idea. A lot of the work filtering through the music, because now we've got experts that are curating it for you. And as you can see, so we've got Upfront Club, we have Urban, essentially, if you play hip-hop. Halloween just passed, we just had some Halloween packs, and we do a lot of themed stuff. Christmas is coming on, so we're going to be having dance tracks from Christmas music, for example. And again, on the right side here are top downloads. You can see what other DJs are downloading. As you can see, we have some of the biggest labels, Spin Records, Atlantic, Columbia, Armada, Universal, and the list goes on and on. We take our music seriously. We're always looking for the latest and greatest labels. And we do the service of getting the music to the...

To the end user, which is our DJ. So yeah, again, let me reiterate, it's not for the general population of just music lovers, but really just a DJ website. And more than that, we have a DJ community. You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We're always posting new releases and interesting articles on the scene. And really, it's a site built by DJs for DJs. Again, am I right in saying, hopefully I am this time, that it's a one-off fee per month and then you can download as much as you want? Yeah, so it's an unlimited download basis and you can either join month to month, so it's a monthly recurring subscription, or you can join as long as a year and it recurs every year. And so obviously the longer you join, if you...

11:49 More than enough of your supply for your DJ needs, right?

Join for a year, it's a real great price and it only works out to $35 a month, which is really nothing if you try to buy $35 worth of music on legitimate dance shops, you're not going to get very far. More than enough of your supply for your DJ needs, right? For your gigs, for your radio shows and all that. So pretty much someone could say, for example, they could sub up for a year and if they wanted to, they could sit in front of their laptop 24-7 and just carry on downloading and it would still only cost them that one price. Correct, yeah, they just pay for the year. That's pretty good. They can log in anytime and get all the music that's in there. Again, because our service is really a promotional service for labels, there's also a feedback and a chart contribution component. So basically we're asking DJs to give their feedback on certain releases, the ones that the labels opt to have feedback for. So what that means is essentially before they download it, they give their comment of what they think, their favorite mix, whether they chart it or not.

A rating from 1 to 10. It's real simple feedback, but this is really good tools for the labels because they can use your quotes, your feedback for their marketing and promotion of the site. Like I said, I'd like to stress, we're really just for the elite kind of DJs where that... Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's a subscription-based pool is what we are. We're a record pool. And, you know, we're there to get the music into the hands of pro DJs so that they can support the labels' efforts and the artists and producers and hopefully ultimately expose those records so that they can sell more. I mean, that's what we're there for. All right. What's the big house tune at the moment? Big EDM tune that people are just going mad for?

14:27 This is our main charts and this is our top download chart

Well, if I go into the charts, there's a chart section here. So right, as you can see, we have two very, two charts. This is our main charts and this is our top download chart. So right now, the top download chart is a record by Felix Jean. Yeah. And Lost Frequency, called Eagle Eyes. Lucas and Steven. Yep. There's David Guetta, new David Guetta. On the club, on the chart side, the mainstream dance, we have Major Lazer, which has been a... Huge record and still big, being on the cheerleader. If we go to the club chart, we have Tiesto at the top. If we go to the urban chart, we've got Fetty Rap. So you can see that you could sort by genre. Of course, Sean Frank Heaven, fellow Canadian here with his big track on the house chart. So yeah, there's a lot of good... And that's the good thing is you could...

See what other DJs are playing as well. On the left here, we offer playlists of what other guys are playing. Yeah, I was going to say, left-hand side, you've got different DJs. So in a way, you may have your idol DJ there. You can see what he and she is playing and pretty much download their exact top 10, can't you? Exactly. So if I go into, you know, this is DJ Decozy, you know, popular house DJ producer. This is his chart. So if I like stuff that he's grabbing, I can grab those as well. I forgot to mention a real important feature of our site is a keyword search, which is really important because as I start to type here with something I'm looking, I get my search results, right? Yeah, I got you. So if I'm looking for the new Sean Frank song, I just hit my type Sean Frank, hit enter, and here's all the Sean Frank records in the middle. And here's his...

16:24 Clicking onto new pages

Yeah, so it's important that you have, and we could even get into advanced searches. So you could search by label, you could search by genre, and you could search also like we have a thing called CanCon in Canada which is a Canadian content regulation. We're Canadian based so if they want to play Canadian music they can search Canadian music. Right, nice. One feature I do like, as you said earlier on, it's all on the one page. You know, you're not... Clicking onto new pages. All right, the page does change, but then you don't have to refresh or go somewhere else or even to the download, you know. Yeah, it's developed like an application, right? Yeah, it's very good. So if I want to go to my download, I'm ready to download. I click Download Manager. And it's there. These are my tracks that I put into my cart, which we call our Download Manager. And then I just click one button, Batch Download, and the good thing is it's going to batch those into a zip file. We'll see in a second.

There's my zip file, and I would save that to my hard drive. I would pick where I'm saving it, away I go, and now it's downloaded. And the beautiful thing about that is that when I open that zip batch download, they're all ID3 meta-tagged. I just drag and drop them into my crates on my software, and they have the artist and producer and the BPM and the label field. Everything's filled out for me, so I'm already organized. Fantastic. All right, we'll draw this to a close now, but listen, thank you very much indeed. Thank you for having me, Ben. And I'd like to mention as well, we're going to hopefully connect with you again in a couple of months as we're working on our version 3, which is a brand new...

Overhaul of the entire set. We've actually built it from the ground up. So I'm excited to show you that when it's ready. For the professional DJ. So the key features, professional DJ, all styles of music, one fee per month or per year. And then as we say in the UK, you can fill your boots. So I'll finish off with practice and enjoy. By the way, there will be a link, a hyperlink in the description to zipdj.com down there in the description of the video. So go and check them out. Practice and enjoy. Thank you.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.