We were given the opportunity to speak with BBC Radio 1′s Gilles Peterson about Worldwide, a retrospective compilation he released earlier in the week. There were just too many good questions to edit into one article, so we’re throwing rest of Granneh‘s interview in our review of the album tomorrow.

Dipped in Dollars: I imagine people send you a lot of music and are recommended music all the time, but you must also look for music yourself. How do you go about that? How do you make sure you don’t stagnate as a DJ?

Gilles: It’s changed a lot in the last few years. The first thing is, I’m not searching to have the exclusive stuff like I used to. Before it kind of became an obsession for a lot of DJ’s to be first. Nowadays, with the internet and the amount of mp3′s going around everywhere, I’m just happy to play great music whenever I hear it. In another way, Djing is a game that a lot of boys play. It’s a fun game, but it gets quite competitive.

These days I go to record shops every couple of weeks. I’ve got three or four people who help me out too. I’ve got a DJ called Simbad who’s in London and gets me a lot of music. He’s kind of a hustler with a good nose for finding music, you know – spending a lot of time online. I’ve got a guy called Lefto, who’s in Belgium, and is brilliant. He tends to get me a lot of the more hip-hop, electronic, American stuff – the California/Flying Lotus area, all that sort of stuff. Then I’ve got my dubstep people, and the bPm looks after me. What happens is you end up having four or five people who all do a lot of sharing. It works well and is less pressurized than it used to be. I still listen to demo’s old school style, which I prefer, because if you do it through soundcloud I just get so much stuff that it’s ridiculous. No one has time to listen to that much music.

DID: Is there a certain quality you search for in the music you play?

G: For me, I don’t really analyze anything too much. At the end of the day I’m just somebody who has the privilege of being able to share their taste with other people. I just approach what I do on the radio or in clubs by playing what I personally want to hear, and if they go with that, great, if they don’t – that’s the way it goes. But that’s been my philosophy throughout my entire life as a DJ.

DID: The internet has now become the predominant means of propagating music. Coming from Pakistan, I had no direct link to any of the music I discovered. I heard of your radio show from a music blog, and find most of the music I listen to through the internet. I feel like you, being in the scene for some twenty years as a DJ/record label owner, have been able to see this shift in new music is spread . What do you the think of rise of the music blog?

G: It’s amazing that people are discovering my show, or new music through a blog. In a way, it opens music up to everybody. If you show an interest or passion in something – then through the internet, you can get your satisfactions looked after. It was a lot more difficult twenty years ago. You could have gone past all of this stuff and not had any clue it existed, so these days I’m celebrating it.

I really think it’s great, and there’s a lot of great music being made at the moment. A lot of artists aren’t trying to aim their music at getting a record deal. People are just satisfying themselves in a community of their own creation, and it’s up to us to discover it if we want to. I feel like a lot of the music that’s coming out now, being signed, and going across on a bigger level is a lot more interesting than it was 10 years ago.

DID: How has the role of the record label changed with this rise?

G: Record labels are very different. If you’re running with a major label now, they’ll want to own you. They’ll want to own not just your recordings, but also publishing and a percentage of all your income.

For a smaller record label like my own, Brownswood, we just found a formula that makes everybody survive. The expectations are a lot lower than they were ten years ago. You’re going to sell a lot less vinyl, a lot fewer CD’s, but you might sell a bit more digitally. We currently have three or four artists/staff that I can afford to pay. Obviously, we aren’t going to become millionaires, but we aren’t losing money, which is key.

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