Deep house worth hearing, without wading through everything else.

Every store sorts by what landed today, and what landed today is mostly filler. This sorts 215,000 deep house releases by what collectors actually want — so the records people have been chasing for twenty years come first, and you can hear them before you decide.

Why the sorting is the whole point

Sorting a music catalogue by release date sounds obvious and returns almost nothing worth playing. Deep house is a particularly bad case: digital labels upload hundreds of near-identical tracks a week, and a newest-first list is simply a list of those. Finding the good ones means scrolling past an enormous amount of noise.

So the feeds here rank by other things. Essential sorts by how many collectors have a record on their wantlist, which turns out to be the closest thing to a canon that exists: Andrés, Pépé Bradock, Round Two, Mr. Fingers, Nu Groove. New is restricted to vinyl, which removes essentially all of the digital filler and leaves real pressings — the same query, with and without that one filter, is the difference between Todd Terry on Freeze and a hundred uploads nobody will ever play twice. Most owned is what people really bought.

How hard a record is to get

Discogs knows how many people own a record and how many want one. The ratio between those two is the nearest thing to a scarcity signal, and it is the number a digger actually cares about — a record 12,000 people want and 500 own is a completely different proposition from one with the same want count and 10,000 copies in circulation.

Wanted at least twice as often as owned is marked hard to find. Four times is a grail. Nothing else is labelled, because a badge on everything would mean nothing on anything.

Where the data comes from

Discogs

Every record, its label, year, pressing and sleeve, and the community counts the ranking and scarcity signals are built from.

Deezer, then Apple

Thirty-second previews. Deezer has the better deep house catalogue and answers most of the time; Apple is asked about what it cannot find.

Discogs, Beatport, Traxsource, Bandcamp, YouTube

Where to buy it, or at least hear it. Only the Discogs link points at the exact release — the others are searches, because none of those shops has an API a site like this can use.

Why some records will not play

Plenty of the best deep house was pressed once and never licensed to any streaming service. Pépé Bradock's Burning is a good example: neither Deezer nor Apple carries any of its three tracks, though both carry his other work. Those records show no preview rather than playing something that merely sounds similar — a cover or a remix in place of the real thing is worse than silence. The YouTube link on each card is usually where they live.

Your crate

Press the crate button on any record to set it aside. Without an account it is kept in your browser; signing in keeps it across devices, and whatever you collected beforehand comes with you rather than being replaced. Sign-in is by Google or an emailed link — there is no password, so there is nothing for this site to store or lose.

Who made it

A side project from Dogglounge Deep House Radio, which has been playing this music 24 hours a day since 2003. Every track on the station's recently-played list links straight into this search.

Not affiliated with Discogs, Deezer, Apple, Beatport, Traxsource, Bandcamp or YouTube. Release data is used under the terms of the Discogs API.