The DJ pre-gig checklist: what to check before you play out

The famous gig disasters have something in common. At Ultra 2023, Zedd's USB and his backup drives were both corrupted by a software problem; he'd been making edits right up to the last minute. At Coachella 2015, David Guetta's computer crashed before he could export his playlists, so he played off USB sticks loaded in random order. In 2025, Loco Dice had a USB and hard drive holding his whole archive taken from a bag in the DJ booth. None of it was really about the gear. It was about where the library lived and when it was last checked.

Here's the checklist. Print it, or save this page.

Two days before

• Build your gig USB now, not the night before. New edits after this go in one small "tonight" playlist. If that breaks, you lose three tracks, not the set.
• Export two USBs, one at a time. Never clone one stick from the other. Cloning a broken export just gives you two broken USBs.
• Play the first 5 seconds of every track on the stick. Corrupt files show up instantly.
• Check that your top 20 tracks have a key and BPM set, and find duplicates of your 10 most-played tracks. Keep the copy with your cues.
• Make a "Panic" crate: 10 tracks that always work, for when the room dies or a track won't load.
• Make a "+1 hour" crate. Promoters ask for more time more often than you think, and "date added" is not a set.
• Name crates by moment, not genre: Warmup, Peak, Last 3. You'll find things faster in a dark booth.

The day before

• Back up the library itself, not just the music. Your cues, crates and playlists live in your DJ software's database: in rekordbox, use the backup option under File → Library; in Serato, copy the _Serato_ folder. Do it with the app closed.
• Ask the venue which players and firmware they run, and test your USB on the same setup if you can. Write down your own firmware and software versions.
• Have one copy that isn't a USB. A second laptop, or a second DJ app, holding the same playlists and cues. If a stick dies, you plug in the laptop. Keeping that copy current by hand is the step most DJs skip; a sync tool such as CrateBridge keeps it matched automatically.

At the venue

• Plug in early and load three tracks before your slot. Check that cues and waveforms look right.
• Eject your USB properly every time, and keep the backup stick on you, not in the bag under the booth.
• Going back-to-back? Agree on one library format before the night, and carry each other's sets as playlists, not a folder of loose files.

The one rule behind all of it

Your gig USB is a copy, never the original. Keep your library in at least two places that aren't in the same bag, so a dead laptop or a stolen stick costs you a night, not everything.

That second copy is what CrateBridge (ours) is for: one library, with its crates, cues and playlists, kept in sync across rekordbox, Serato, VirtualDJ, Engine DJ and djay, on every computer you use. Related reading: how to back up your DJ library.