I just received word that various artists are going to start releasing stems, stripped down samples, and various bits of their songs for download on Beatport. I've been using this site pretty much since it's inception in 2004 and must admit that this is one of the best new enhancements they have added.

If you're unfamiliar with how this works, basically a producer will take one of their songs and strip out all of the individual samples from it that you can download in a single pack. The pack will usually contain the percussion as one MP3, the pads as another, the vocals as another, etc. This takes the work out of having to actually go into the original song and trying to run EQ curves to isolate specific parts of the song that you want to extract and fuss with having to resample, run additional filters, etc to get what you need. Now I'm definitely not condoning straight up copying parts of a producer's work to straight up lift and use in your own work, but to use a part in a DJ mix creatively opens up a world of creative possibilities.

Having several CDJ's at hand, anything from the FX filled Pioneer CDJ 1000 to even a decent midrange player like my Denon DNS-1000 with solid looping/transient detection will definitely work well with this. Obviously these are great for Ableton sets too. Looks like most packs run at around $3.99, where you will get the full song as well as all of the pieces as 320 kbps mp3's. You're definitely going to want to buy the full pack though, they're selling each individual stem at $1.99 a piece (why would they do this?)

Obviously there are going to be many artists who will not participate as they're worried about people using the samples in their own work, but as of it's introduction there are already a number of tracks available by the likes of Johnny Fiasco, King Unique, and Electric Deluxe.