Zipdj : an Overview of the #1 Source of Music for Pro DJs with Nick Fiorucci

0:00 You may have heard me talk about this for quite a while

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another mad video. My name's Jonathan, of course, Ellaskins DJ Tutor, and I have in front of me on Skype, this is a guy called Nick. Now, I'm not doing OBS, I'm not doing that really crazy sort of OBS sharing where we can do all that... Well, anyway, put it this way, we like it punk. Now, Nick, I've known this guy for a very long time and he is the founder of ZipDJ.com. You may have heard me talk about this for quite a while. Well, it's one of the best sites in the world, if not the best site in the world, for DJs who want an eclectic mix of music, alright? So, I'm going to hand the mic over to Nick, who's going to give a bit of introduction, who he is...

Where he's from, what he does and everything about Zip DJ and also the new features of the new updated website. So Nick, mic's over to you dude. DJ Tutor, brother in the house. How are you brother? Loving it man, loving it. Man, it's been too long. We've been trying to connect I don't know how many months now, potentially in the years. We gotta get together, get an update. You fish as well dude, don't you? You fish. I do. Yeah, and me. I'm going to go out on my kayak later. Nice, nice. I just went for the first time this year after lockdown, bass fishing, and it was really fun. It was hot. Toronto's weather is great. Lovely. Just about an hour and a half north of Toronto, there's some really nice lakes, and yeah, enjoying the weather. It's 30 degrees today, so it's hot. Mind you, I'm in my office here, and it's nice and cool. Loving it.

Outside shortly, but great to see you man. I'm loving the channel, loving your content, keeping it real. Thank you sir. Yeah, just, I mean, I wanted to just kind of get caught up with you and just sort of tell you what's been, what we've been up to. And we're in our 13th year now and you've been with us for a long time for the ride. So you've seen the old website which is... DJ Tutor And our focus on the build was that music discovery reinvented, a way to this kind of, that's kind of our tagline, our motto, to really just give away to DJs to discover music. I mean, when you go to a shop typically, you know, you have your charts, your sales charts, you have DJ charts and so on, but we wanted to just kind of dive in on how...

3:02 I'd love to give you a tour if that's okay

DJs could get their music quickly, could discover new music quickly, find the things they like and find things that they would never have thought that, you know, potentially they would like, you know. So I'd love to give you a tour if that's okay. Go with it. Okay, so you're going to share the screen, yeah? I will, absolutely. So let's see if this works here. Tell me if that's working. Yeah, I can see me, I can see you. See you, fantastic, good stuff. Okay, I'm going to switch to my... So there's my... I'll move this kind of out of the way. So this is our new front end, the new DJ landing page. Talks about our features, the unlimited download, the bright range of music, why you should join ZipDJ, the fact that, for me, the biggest thing for me when a DJ is saying, why not...

Go to just a shop. Why not go to, you know, Beatport or iTunes or whatever and just buy my music there? I mean, what is a record pool? Well, first and foremost, coming from a label background, I mean, we are really one of the only pools around that really focuses on the content that we get from our labels and really just like to promote it to professional DJs. Because the more DJs that play the music that labels are releasing... The more it's getting heard by the public, and of course as you know these days with technology, people are holding a phone. If they like a track, they hold their phone in the air and they're shazamming and adding music to their playlist. So consumption from these days from a record label standpoint is great. The more people that could potentially hear...

5:41 This version we've really beefed up our dissection of genres

What they're doing is going to benefit everybody. And to me, again, the biggest thing from a DJ standpoint is saving time. It's going to one spot where you know you're going to have quality music, all the top labels, and you don't have to think, it's all there. So these are just more information pages anybody can access. Some of the key features, the search and preview really kicked it up. It's incredibly fast. We have hot keys so you could use it like DJ software. You don't even need a mouse. You can literally use your keyboard to navigate throughout the website. Nice. We focus, of course, on our library and our label partners and the quality and being fast and efficient. As this says, all mixes, all versions, all genres. So this version we've really beefed up our dissection of genres. We know that these days guys like to hone in on what they love. It's not only let's say house music but they love deep tech or something really specific. So now you can hone in on that before it was more of a broader range of music.

A bunch of new key features which I'll get into is our pricing plans. Now we have intro plans starting at $25 a month for pro DJs and you can do an introductory offer at $35. We put a big focus on curation on this new version as well. So for guys that don't have the time, there's a lot of music. In fact, thousands of releases coming in weekly. And you just don't have the time to go through new releases. We have these things called essential packs where we're putting together... We have the famous Ben Liebrand, who's been a DJ for Jesus 30 years. He was one of the, I believe, one of the co-founded DJs for the DMC Club in the UK back in the early 80s. Not only edits these 12-inch versions that are crazy, of all like 70s and 80s and 90s, great stuff, but exceptional mastering quality as well. He's really got, he's a perfectionist, he's really got an ear for mastering, so we're really happy to have his collections on board as well.

8:46 You know, reggaeton, etc., etc

So I'm going to dive in. Again, these are just sites that anybody can explore on the outside. I'm going to log in now and give you a tour of the inside, which I'm excited to show you. I know you've already been in and I'm happy that you've checked it out. So when you land basically on the homepage, you're in new releases. And these are basically... So this could be anything then? This could be hip-hop, house... One album, so right with all the tracks in here in the case here it's a single single you'll see stuff with two mixes going on and this is our what we call our release view and they're literally go from you know house trance there's urban r&b country music top 40 reggae uh trabacta trance latin reggaeton afro house deep house so it's really a wide

This is just new releases as the labels deliver it. You know, reggaeton, etc., etc. And now there's different views and this is what I love about what we've done. So that's our release pack view. We have a track view, which again, I'm still now filtered by Urban, and track view. So these are the individual tracks with the different mixes. And the beauty of it is you can literally hit play here. In fact, let me just, let me hit up, I'm going to go to house music here. If you can Nick, if you could only maybe play two or three seconds so I just, because this is going to go on YouTube and I just in case we get any shit with, or is there a track that you have that you know won't do any copyright infringement?

Yeah, I don't think, I'll do a very short clip. It's just to show you how fast. I'll really just scroll through up here. So like literally you hit play and I can literally go through the tracks. Very quickly, I don't know if you hear that. Yeah, I can. You know, and if I like the track, bang, I add it. There's the download button and there it goes into my download manager. Yeah, gotcha. Sorry, the phone. Let me shut off the phone in the back. My notifications are... And there's a quick way to access my... What's in kind of your download manager or cart, so to speak. Yeah. You know, if you add something by mistake, you could remove it. Yeah. If you want the full view of it, there it is there. And then you can close the site and that's the stuff I'm ready to download. Now I could take a download and do an individual download and it just...

11:32 Very quickly asked me where I want to save it, right?

Very quickly asked me where I want to save it, right? And you just save and it's that fast. It's already on my computer. Or I could say, hey, I want to do a batch download. And so now it's taking all of these records, batching them. It's creating a zip file. All the music is ID3 meta tags. So when you drop it in your DJ software, you just open up the zip file, drop it in your... So there's my batch. It takes a couple seconds to get ready and I'm going to put it, I'll just put in my downloads for now. And so now I'm downloading a batch and you can see that I had, I don't know how many tracks there, but instantly it was on my computer very, very fast and there you are. Yep. And there's the tracks and they're all labeled and now I can take this stuff, drop it in my software and away I go. So it's really simple, so let's go back to it.

So, just giving you back to the homepage, giving a little tour of what we've linked features. So, top downloads is not a new feature, but what we've done is we've really amped up the filtering on this website. So, we have what we call our mega menu now for all the genres. Nice. You can, again, dance and the genres underneath. You know, you've got your classics, country, miscellaneous pop, rock alternative, house. Wow. That is cool, that's very cool. Yeah, so if you want just bass, there you go, boom, it selects just bass on my top downloads. If I go to releases and I select, again, any subgenres, let's take Deep House here for example, there's all my Deep House, I could go to track view and there you go, and stream through my track view. And that is very, very fast, saving Jace time. You clear the filter and move on. One of the most...

14:21 With an upcoming version, we're going to dissect it even further

Exciting new features is our trending charts. This is something that we literally took, I don't know, Jesus, a year and a half to work on. And it's really proprietary. Nobody really has anything like this in the sense that we are taking analytics and data from literally a thousand data points and putting it all together, possibly more. And when I say that, we're taking streaming into effect, sales. Around the world, Shazamming, Consumption, iTunes, Spotify, Beatboard, TrackSource, all kinds of data and putting it together in what we call a trending chart. And again, it's got all the different genres, but you could break it down. So this is, in this case I'm an electronic, but I can see what's happening airplay worldwide. And there we go, this is what's happening airplay. That is cool, very good.

With an upcoming version, we're going to dissect it even further. You'll be able to see... What's the top streaming tracks around the world or what's the top streaming tracks in the UK for example? We're going to have a country drop down and we're going to have this filtered into different more... Even more broken up genres so that you can filter really what you want. Wow, that's cool. Mainstream chart which is really sales-based, what's happening from worldwide. And yeah, we'll have a country filter so that you'll be able to say, okay, what's happening from a sales perspective in the UK, right? Or what's happening with electronic music in the UK. And so we're really excited about this, and it literally just goes on pages and pages. You can see 137 pages in this particular thing. So there's 100 per page, so there's 1,300 tracks that you could go through. These are all new, as you can see. Because like you said, you're updating all the time, aren't you?

All the time, there's tracks like, so the way it works with ZipDJ is we have the labels themselves have a label dashboard, a portal that they log in that's separate to this and they upload their music. So at any given time, any moment right now of some label could be uploading their new releases. Wow. And yeah, us on the back end, we just make sure that... The metadata is good, the quality is good, the tracks got uploaded great, and then we make it live. And that's where it ends up on the new releases on this page. And so it's constantly a flow of new music coming through. So let me dive through some others. So top downloads are obviously self-explanatory. That's what people are downloading, DJs are downloading within our website itself. But I could say, hey, what are the Latin top downloads?

17:29 These are the percentage of people who've gone for that instead of

The DJ Tutor offers a wide range of different charts, including electric house top-downs. The mix is in one place. So as I expand here, I can see the mixes of each of the things that are on the chart. And then I can see not only here's the mixes, but I can see by percentage which is the most popular mix of each track. So I can see in this case extended mix by 73% followed by the radio mix. And these are the downloads, aren't they? These are the percentage of people who've gone for that instead of... Exactly. Of when you've got a pack of mixes, what are the most popular? So if your DJ doesn't have the time and you just say, okay, great record but give me the most popular mix, bang, you can just look at the percentage here and grab the most popular mix or the most popular two mixes and so forth. When you download to where our label partners are getting feedback as well, they know who downloaded it, what DJ, there's...

If they offer feedback, when you hit the download button, you'll get a small pop-up that asks you to leave a comment or your quick feedback so that it goes back to the labels. And they could use it for their marketing as well. Nice. The DJ Tutor downloaded this track in full support and so forth and so forth. Here's the DJ pack section I was talking about a little earlier. These are our essentials, so these are kind of the main... We have a bunch of different categories and then we dive into some other cool curation Professionals like yourself that are curating, listening to all the music that's coming in from the labels and saying, okay, these are the ones we feel are the best. So these are human curated packs, whereas the top downloads and the trending charts are literally taking from different sources, giving you a scope on what's going on. We mentioned Ben Lieberman. We're up to four volumes and you could go into a pack and see all the tracks and they're all...

20:20 Ultra Music, we could see their

You know, amazing full-length versions, all remastered, excellent quality. Because how old is he? He's got to be in his 60s, hasn't he? I don't know if he's that old. Yeah, Jonathan, I don't think he's that old. I think he's probably late 50s. Late 50s, yeah. I don't think he's that old. But yeah, he's been in the game a long time. He's still very active, still producing, still doing edits, still does his radio show. So it's quite exciting. Club hits rework series, we're really excited because it's kind of like... What are the records that kind of, you know, older records that have been reworked in today's kind of sound, you know? Right, got it. And so that's that and some rock stuff and you just can keep navigating. Here's our label section where you could dive into a label that you love, right? You can pick, you know, here if we go to Ultra Music, we could see their latest releases and we could see what is their biggest...

If you like a particular artist on the page, then here's an artist. I click on the artist, it filters all the releases from the artist. That is great. I like that. I could click on the actual cover as well and go into the release page. Do you know what? Nick, I think you've thought of everything here, haven't you? We took a long time to... Yeah. No wonder it took you over a year. Yeah, and this is the best. My favorite feature here is the search. So let's search, I don't know, Calvin Harris. Let's see what we have. So Calvin, at the moment, as you can see, as I start to type... It's very, very fast. I don't even have to finish the word. It's like a Google search. So I could instantly see, okay, let's pick Calvin Harris. Now I could pick anything related to Calvin Harris and that would show me all his tracks. Let me just go back to that result. I could see all the releases related to Calvin Harris and I could see all there or I could see all the tracks related to anything with Calvin Harris whether it's a remix, an artist release itself.

23:25 I mean, it's a DJ culture that we're building

I'm glad you brought Calvin Harris because... Maybe some people who are watching this video think, Zip DJ, yeah, you know, I'll find the best underground tunes, but, you know, there's nothing out there that's going to be commercial. But, I mean, Calvin Harris is about as commercial as you can get. And you've just shown people there's a gazillion Calvin Harris remixes there. Oh, yeah, for sure. There you go, 36 pages of Calvin Harris remixes. DJs that are working, DJs professional guys. Serious, we don't like to, we won't, you know, if you're a friend of so-and-so, no, I'm sorry, unless you're working DJ, you just don't get in. I mean, it's a DJ culture that we're building. Yes. Yeah, so then here's another way to break up our genres. Here's kind of like packs together and then again, go dissect into a page itself. But let's say I click just dance.

This brings me to the dance homepage. So now within dance, I see all the sub-genres of dance, so house, dubstep, chill, dance commercial, acapellas and so forth. Or I see even further, I dissect it so we got our sub-genres and then our sub-sub-genres. And I go even further. There's the new releases of dance, there's the top downloads of dance, you can see what's trending in dance, here's all the releases. And it just keeps going. I click on a release and see everything of that release. So yeah, we're really excited about that and the main thing is it's very fast, you know? Yeah, it is. Easy to find stuff, easy to discover stuff and it's quite exciting on how the DJs have, you know, we have a little feedback thing because we really want to...

26:05 It's got to have value to our label partners

What I want to say, Nick, is that it's the most important part of your website. And it's on the minds of everyone, which is the cost, the money. Because some people, you know, they go out, they earn big bucks. Other people, working DJs, professionals, maybe once a week if they're lucky. But what I like mainly about Zip DJ is that, you know, you're not paying for one track and then you're paying for another track. DJ tutorial by Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor. It's got to have value to our label partners. We're not just giving away music to fill hard drives, we're not giving music to build libraries for your own consumption, for your phones and this and that. We are literally for professionals only and the labels work closely with us, they get feedback, they know who downloaded it, when they downloaded it, where they...

Where they're from, what clubs they play, what bars they play, what events they do. It gets into your DJ profile section here where you have literally all your information that you fill out, what clubs I play, my profile of what, as it loads here, all my details, what music styles I like. If I'm a club DJ, if I'm a radio DJ, a mix show DJ, etc., etc. DJs are downloading music that they're going to hopefully support in their gigs, in their sets, in their events. And we're hoping that... The world gets back to that. Just this morning I was looking at some videos of some Rave footage on my Instagram feed and I'm like, man, I can't wait till the world gets back to that. I know, dude. Tell me about it. It's truly missed. I mean, it's horrendous on how everything, the world has just kind of flipped on its own and it's changed but we hope that things are getting better. They seem to be getting better.

And that's what we're here for, sir, when the DJs are getting back onto their gigs. We've been very active. The guys, I mean, you know what's happened, as you know, and you're the king of this. You got your YouTube channel, you got all your social medias going on. But DJs need music for their live feeds now. So even though they're not gigging at the local clubs or the local bars or doing events... A lot of DJs are doing live streaming. So many more now, it's like every night on my feed on Facebook you can see so many people live streaming, it's crazy. It's good though, it's good. Yeah, fantastic. So it's opened up a different world, DJs are starting to, and it's interesting because you can reach everybody, anybody who's potentially a fan can tune in, so it's fantastic. So it's become, the music industry is definitely evolving.

29:18 Can see this is just me recording with the camera

And you've been on the video game for a long time. The video's becoming more and more important, live video, with YouTube Live and Instagram Live and Facebook Live and Twitch and so forth. It's crazy. Can we see you again, Nick, though? Can you put yourself back on screen, dude? Absolutely, yeah. How do I share? Stop my screen here. So, yeah. Sorry, man. There we go. Cool. Unless I'll stop my screen. Oops. You see this is, I'm old school. People can see this is just me recording with the camera. Yeah, exactly. This is it. It's like, you know, you wake up in the morning, you rub your eyes, it doesn't matter who you are around the world, you go for a shit, you get up and, you know what I mean? The fact that that's, you know, whether you're reviewing gear or talking about something passionate about DJ, you know, whatever. I like how it's just raw and dirty, man. That's the way. Straight up, right? And I appreciate your support. You've been there for a long time and hopefully your DJ listeners get something out of it and you do as well. No, sure. Well, this video, even if it just inspires one or two people,

Out there, it's made a difference. It has made a difference. It's like I keep on saying to everyone, you know what I mean? There are, just bring the camera out, you know, there's loads of pools and I mean, I said to Nick before I started videoing, I do have not daily, maybe once every couple of months I get another pool go, you know, Jonathan we like what you do, would you please use our music? And they may have good websites but... I don't need it because I've got everything I need with you guys. That's it. You know, I do have other pools I work with. I don't want to contradict myself. There's a pool for MP4s and also there's another pool in the UK that I've worked with probably as long as you but then each one is completely different and I'm sticking to you three guys because

You know, Nick, you know your shit. You know what it's about. I know what it's about. I can go on ZipDJ and I can look up some great new techno, some great new deep house, some Latin, or I can think, well, what's big in hip-hop in the US? And I know it's there on your site, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's, you know, we have a small team, but we're diligent at making sure that the labels are staying. We're giving new music, music discovery for guys that are serious about their craft and doing... DJ tutorial by Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor. The criteria is very, very simple. You've got to be a working DJ. You can't just be some regular guy who like, yeah, I'm going to go online and I'm going to hook up because you do have to fill in your details. And trust me, those details will be looked at. They're going to check you out. So if you say you're going to be working in a nightclub down the road, they will more than likely contact that nightclub and say, does this guy work for you?

If you don't, then you're just going to look an idiot. So make sure you're a working DJ. Go to zipdj.com and just try it out. Fill in the forms, fill in the details. And like I said earlier, it's not you pay per track. You pay per month and then you can download one track a month or you could download a thousand. But you're only going to download the music you need really. But Nick, again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, man. I appreciate you having me, for sure. Okay, if people are interested as well, in the description of this video there will be a hyperlink that will take you to ZipDJ.com. It'll be the one directly below the title. Click on it and even if you just want to dip your big toe in the water, just check it out like Nick showed you earlier.

There are pages that you can look at before you take the plunge and go and dive in. So have a look first, and is there anywhere where people can contact you first, maybe ask a few questions? Yeah, definitely. There's a contact form right on the homepage, zipdj.com. There's a contact right there, so yeah, they can send us whatever questions. I mean, the website's pretty thorough, it answers a lot of FAQs, but definitely, they can definitely write us any time. Get in touch and we're always on top of it. That's another thing we really pride ourselves for is making sure we reply to our DJ community or any questions, any concerns, any features as you've seen. We have our feedback forms where DJs can say, hey, I wish it had this feature, I wish it had that. We're constantly evolving with new upgrades on the website. Fantastic.

Alright, well Nick, it's been a pleasure and I'm going to finish off by saying practice and enjoy. Thank you guys, take care.

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