Edited by Steve Shah

This paper is an excerpt from Steve Shah's alt.music.makers.dj FAQ that he edited. More info about the FAQ can be found at the bottom of this paper.


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1. Always master your mixtape on DAT, anything less would be uncivilized :) If you don't own a DAT, borrow one from a friend, rent one or if you're short on cash. Don't be one of those cheezy DJs who master their tapes on cassette and then dubs all the copies off of that, bad.......very very bad.

2. Now, once you have your perfect master DAT (which is no easy task) you have to start to ask yourself some questions about marketing, money and just how big a DJ you really think you are. All of these center around how many copies you want to run off, or the real question, how many copies of your mixtape do you think you can sell? Trust me, you don't want to be stuck with 500 mixtapes going nowhere. You want to be able to sell (or give away) almost every tape you produce so think carefully how many you want to run off. Your two options are to dub them off yourself (for the low to medium volume DJ) or retain the services of a professional tape duplicator.


There is also the in store "politics" problem where you have to learn how to get on the good side of the people working in the store so when when people come in the shop and ask for a good mixtape, they will push your tape. Just being a good DJ isn't enough unfortunately and usually all you have to do is give everybody who works in the store free copies of all your mixtapes. I know this sucks but trust me, your mixtapes will just sit there forever and you won't sell anything if the people who work there don't recommend your tape, especially if you're a new DJ.


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