Deep Cuts Near the Artists You Already Play

Pull up your last few sets, or scroll back through what you actually played over the last month, and count the names that keep showing up. For most DJs it's the same five or six — the artists everyone already knows, the ones whose tracks land on every chart and every other set in the room too. Nothing wrong with any of them. But the moment half the crowd can hum the drop before it hits, you've lost some of what makes a set feel like yours instead of a highlights reel someone else already made.

The usual fix is scrolling a "similar artists" panel on a streaming platform, which mostly hands you the same big names back with a different logo on the tile. There 's a better way in, and it's a workflow rather than a list: start from a track you already trust, follow chemistry instead of fame outward from it, and let the smaller names that actually sound right surface on their own.

Why popularity and “similar” aren't the same thing

Most similar-artist panels are built from who-else-people-streamed data. That reliably surfaces other big names, because big names get streamed by everyone, which feeds them into everyone else's similar-artist panel too — a loop that only ever points back at scale, not at fit. It can't tell the difference between "this artist genuinely grooves like the one you searched" and "this artist happens to get played by roughly the same audience." A deep cut that's actually closer in sound might never surface this way, simply because it hasn't racked up enough plays to become data yet.

Chemistry works differently. Instead of who-else-listened, it looks at how two tracks actually sound and mix together — how their energy, groove, mood, and harmonic and rhythmic profiles line up. Fame doesn't enter into it. That means a much smaller artist whose tracks genuinely fit can sit right alongside, or ahead of, the household name whose newest release has quietly drifted away from the sound you actually want.

Start from a track you trust, not an artist name

Here's the part that trips people up: they go looking for a lesser-known "version" of a big artist, searching that artist's name and hoping something obscure turns up in their back catalogue. Flip it. Search the specific track you already know works — the one that's never once let you down in a set — and open its track page.

The reason that flip matters is that a track page scores chemistry off the track itself, not the name attached to it. A huge artist's biggest single and a tiny artist's one good release can sit at nearly identical chemistry to the track you started from, if the sound genuinely lines up. Starting from the track rather than the artist is what lets the lesser-known name get a fair shot at showing up at all.

Let chemistry do the walking on a track page

Once you're on that track page, you'll usually recognise a couple of names near the top of its matches — that's expected, the well-known stuff tends to be well-known because it genuinely mixes well too. Keep scrolling past them. Somewhere below the familiar names you'll start seeing artists you've never booked a ticket to see, sitting at chemistry scores just as strong as the big ones above them. That's the list worth actually reading.

Pick one of those unfamiliar names and open the track page for whichever of their tracks showed up. Now do it again from there. Each hop takes you a little further from the mainstream, but chemistry keeps you anchored to the sound the whole way — you're never drifting off into "vaguely the same genre," you're walking a chain of tracks that each genuinely mix with the one before it. Three or four hops in, you'll usually have found at least one name you'd never have typed into a search bar on your own.

Compare two artists to find who sits between them

Once you've got a name or two turning up repeatedly on that walk, it's worth checking how close the fit actually is before you sink an hour into their catalogue. Open Compare and pick the artist you already trust alongside the one you just found. You'll see their Sound DNA sit side by side on a radar, the best bridge tracks between them, and how far apart their tempo and harmonic ranges actually sit — a fast way to tell "close enough to bridge convincingly" from "superficially similar but a stretch in practice."

It works the other way too. If you've landed on two smaller names in the same walk, comparing them against each other tells you whether they're actually neighbours or just both loosely near the artist you started from — useful before you build a whole run of a set around the assumption that they sit together.

Test the deep cut before you trust it in a real set

A strong chemistry score is a reason to try a track, not a guarantee it'll hold up in sequence. Before a deep cut earns a spot in a real set, drop it into Flow Builder next to two or three of the regulars it should sit comfortably between, and actually listen through the transitions in order. A track can score well against a single neighbour and still feel like the odd one out once it's sitting inside a run of tracks the room already knows.

If you'd rather not build that test flow by hand, describe the shape you're going for in Build — something like "peak-time techno, keep the energy climbing" — and work the deep cut into the draft it hands back. Either way, give the track one more pass at home before you trust it in front of a crowd: a good chemistry score earns it a place in the test, not automatic entry into Saturday's set.

What to do when you find one worth keeping

Once a deep cut has actually proven itself — it held up in the test flow, it landed in the room, you'd reach for it again — save it to Favourites so it's sitting there ready the next time you build a flow, instead of relying on remembering a name you heard once on a walk three weeks ago. That's the difference between a genuine find and a track you meant to come back to and never did.

And if the walk leads you to a track you know exists — you heard it in someone else's set, or a friend sent you a link — but it isn't in the catalogue yet, put it through Track Requests. You'll get notified once it's resolved, and it'll be sitting there with its own chemistry matches the next time you want to start a walk from it. Do this often enough and your sets stop being a highlights reel of everyone else's favourites and start sounding like the specific, slightly harder-to-place thing only you play.