Thiel

If you make any sort of club must you should be sending your WAV files directly to DJs that you admire, that is your dubplate and it is more powerful than you realize.

Use a private playlisting or file sharing service and send your demos to your friends or post the link directly to your socials. Literally start a small imprint and burn CDs and duplicate tapes of exclusive works in small batches and sell them at your shows for cheap.

Finding your album on a weird corner of soulseek is an infinitely larger badge of honor than getting playlisted on Spotify and you know it.

So we must weaponize the art that we have and refrain from sharing it with those who seek to utilize it in bad faith, and we can do so online by choosing where we distribute our work.

No matter how many marketing campaigns and playlist “curators” the streaming platforms throw at us, we know and they know that music culture and cultural capital trickles upwards to them from the underground and we can decide how far up the pipeline we choose to let musical subcultures trickle.

now our collective rival soundsystem is streaming culture and datascraping at large and it’s proven itself to not compete in good faith.

DJs of old and new understand this mentality better than anyone for obvious reasons. Dubplates were invented as a means of spinning something at your party that the rival soundsystem wouldn’t have, it was a weapon towards victory in a soundclash.

Obviously anything posted to the internet can be duplicated and scraped compared to the “edition of 1” origins of the physical dubplate, but it’s the act of making something at a small scale for your friends and community that encapsulates the dubplate mentality more than the physical medium itself