About eight thousand records sit at Cheongchun 1beonji (청춘1번지), a music café near Jongno 3-ga Station (종로3가역), and every one of them belongs to the man in the booth. Jang Min-wook (장민욱) has been a working DJ since April 1976, when he started in a small dabang (다방) in Guro-gu, which gives him half a century of head start on me. He owns about 84,000 records in all. The rest are in a warehouse he rents just to hold them.
Every one of those records will still play for him tomorrow. No login, no licence check, no terms of service update. He bought them over fifty years, one at a time, and they’re his the way a chair is yours. That warehouse is the clearest position on DJ music ownership I know, and what it shows about the rest of us isn’t flattering.
A Library Used to Be Something You Owned
Owning your records was never romantic at the time. It was weight and money. Any DJ my age remembers what a crate of vinyl does to your back on the fourth floor of a venue with no elevator, and what an import record cost by the time it reached this side of the Pacific. When I started carrying records into Korean rooms, my value was largely that library. The records were scarce, I had them, and the room didn’t. Same deal as the dabang booth in 1976: the DJ as the guy with access.
Look at what that cost structure quietly guaranteed: everything you paid for, you kept. A record bought in 1998 has now worked twenty eight years of gigs. Your library compounded. A DJ’s crates were a career asset you could hold in your hands, insure, lend, sell, or leave to somebody.
Digital kept the ownership model at first. Files were files: buy the WAV, keep the WAV. My USB sticks are the direct descendants of my crates, and most working DJs my age run the same hybrid, owned files backed up in three places plus whatever vinyl survived our moves. Then the subscription arrived, and the deal changed underneath a generation that mostly didn’t read the fine print.
The Repo Men Already Came, Twice
This isn’t a hypothetical. Music you don’t own has already failed DJs in public, at scale, at least twice.
Pulselocker was a streaming service built for DJs, with a locker of offline tracks you could perform with, wired into major DJ software. It shut down in 2017, and every library built on it stopped existing as something you could play. The tracks were never yours, so when the company went, so did they. DJs woke up to sets full of greyed out entries where their music used to be.
Then on 1 July 2020, Spotify stopped working with third party DJ apps. If your playlists lived in Spotify and you performed through an app like djay, that ended on a date you didn’t choose. Years of curation became unplayable in the booth overnight. Nothing was hacked and nothing broke. The system worked exactly as designed: you were renting, and the landlord changed the locks.
Five years later the landlord opened the door again. On 24 September 2025 Spotify announced it was back inside rekordbox, Serato and djay, for Premium subscribers in 51 markets. That’s good news for anyone who wants their playlists in the booth. It also proves the point. Access arrived, left and came back on dates set by a company, and it lasts exactly as long as the subscription does.
To Be Fair, the Locker Is a Great Radio
The current DJ streaming services, Beatport, Tidal and the rest wired into modern players and software, are well built and useful. I’m not telling anyone to boycott them. I use cloud tools like everybody, and nothing beats a streaming catalogue for finding a record at two in the afternoon that you’ll play at two in the morning.
Vinyl has its own costs, too: the weight, the moves, the shelf space and the price. Nobody should pretend a crate is free. But understand the deal you’re signing: the offline locker exists while the subscription exists. Stop paying, and a decade of your professional identity goes back to a company’s database. A DJ twenty years into a streaming first career will have paid for music every month and own none of it. That’s not a library. It’s a treadmill with a search bar.
The Canadian Math
Run it the way my accountant would. Call a modern DJ stack, a streaming tier, a software subscription and cloud storage, somewhere around forty to sixty Canadian dollars a month once you add it all up. Two decades of that is roughly ten to fifteen thousand dollars, about what a serious used record collection or a career’s worth of owned downloads would cost. At the end of the vinyl version you hold the records. At the end of the subscription version you hold a cancellation email. Numbers vary by stack and year, so run your own; the shape doesn’t change.
Listeners Rent Far More Music Than They Buy
US recorded music revenue by format, 2025
음악은 사는 것보다 빌리는 것이 훨씬 많다
How to read itDownloads, the format most DJs own, are the smallest line. Vinyl grew 9.3% in 2025, its 19th straight year of growth in the US.
The wider market says the same thing. In 2025, Americans spent $6.4 billion on music subscriptions and only $273 million on downloads, the format most of us actually own. Vinyl went the other way: US vinyl sales passed $1 billion in 2025, up 9.3%, the 19th year of growth in a row. People keep buying the one format nobody can switch off.
Records have also held up in a way nothing else a DJ buys has. Every controller, player and laptop I’ve bought in more than twenty years is now landfill or a doorstop. The gear lost its value. The records didn’t.
Rent for Discovery, Own What You Play
My policy is simple, and I give it to every younger DJ who asks. Streaming lockers are a great radio and a terrible vault. Use them to find music, then buy the files from stores that sell them, and back them up like they’re your career, because they are. Anything that has been in your sets for a year has earned a purchase. Anything you’d be embarrassed to lose halfway through a set should never live behind a login you don’t control.
Bandcamp, Beatport, Juno Download and Bleep all still sell downloads you keep. For physical, Discogs is the global market, and Seoul has a working record shop culture of its own, which our piece on vinyl bars and LP culture covers.
And buy some records, not as decor but as an anchor. Not eighty four thousand. Enough that some part of your musical identity exists in a form no shutdown, no API decision and no licensing dispute can reach.
The man in Jongno figured this out by never changing. His world is still the music of the seventies and eighties, and it turns out the seventies were right about the thing that matters most in this job. The DJ is the library. Rent the library and you’ve rented yourself. He gets his own profile on this site soon. Until then, the DJs carrying his trade forward are in Korean DJs to Know in 2026, and if you want one of them, or me, behind your event, start at the booking page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do DJs own the music on streaming services?
No. DJ streaming services license music for use while the subscription is active, including tracks stored in offline lockers for performance. If the subscription lapses, or the service closes or loses its licences, access ends. Purchased downloads and physical records are the only parts of a DJ library that work as owned property.
What happened with Pulselocker?
Pulselocker was a subscription streaming and locker service for DJs, built into major DJ software, which shut down in 2017. Because the tracks were licensed rather than owned, libraries and playlists built on it became unusable for performance when it closed. It’s the standard cautionary tale for subscription dependence in DJing.
Does Spotify work with DJ apps again?
Yes. Spotify stopped working with third party DJ apps on 1 July 2020. On 24 September 2025 it announced integrations with rekordbox, Serato and djay, for Premium subscribers in 51 markets. The music is still streamed under licence, so it stays playable only while the subscription and the integration last.
Should DJs still buy music in 2026?
This site’s view, from more than twenty years in the booth: yes. Use streaming for discovery, then buy and back up anything that enters your sets, and keep some physical media as the core of your identity as a selector. In the US, vinyl sales passed $1 billion in 2025, the 19th straight year of growth, while downloads were down to $273 million.
Further Reading on The DJ Diaries
- Sixty years of the Korean DJ, one continuous line
- Seoul’s vinyl bars and LP culture
- Korean DJs to Know in 2026
Sources
- Junsungki magazine on Jang Min-wook’s eighty four thousand records
- OhmyNews on the rented warehouse (January 2020)
- Kyunghyang Shinmun on forty five years in the booth (December 2021)
- CB Insights: Pulselocker company record
- TechCrunch: Beatport moves into streaming (February 2015)
- MusicTech: Spotify will drop support for third party DJ apps from 1 July 2020 (March 2020)
- TechCrunch: Spotify now integrates directly with rekordbox, Serato and djay (24 September 2025)
- Music Week: RIAA, US revenue hits record high as vinyl sales pass $1 billion (16 March 2026)
- RAIN News: streams up, downloads down, RIAA’s 2025 year end report (March 2026)
Written from Seoul, by someone who has been in the booth for more than twenty years. More on the site, or book a DJ.
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