Best DJ Mixes to Listen To Right Now (2026)

2026-09-03

The best DJ mixes live on YouTube, SoundCloud and Mixcloud, with Boiler Room, HOR Berlin, Cercle and the BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix leading the way. Start on YouTube if you want to watch a set, SoundCloud if you just want to listen. Great DJ mixes teach you selection, structure and taste faster than almost anything else.

I listen to other people's mixes every single day. Partly because I love them, and partly because I steal from them, in the way every DJ steals: I hear a transition that shouldn't work, I rewind it, and I work out what they did. When I am stuck for ideas, a two hour set from someone playing a room I have never been in will fix it quicker than a night of scrolling Beatport.

This guide covers where to find DJ mixes worth your time, which platforms are best for what, the genres worth digging into, and how to turn passive listening into actual practice.

Why Listen to DJ Mixes?

You discover music you would never search for. Search engines give you what you already know you want. A DJ mix gives you what somebody with better taste than you decided you should hear next, in an order they thought hard about.

That is the whole point. You get an hour of curation from a person who spends their week digging, and you get it for free.

You learn track selection. Anyone can beatmatch after a few weeks. Choosing the right record at the right moment takes years, and mixes are how you shortcut some of that.

Listen to a set from a DJ you rate and you are hearing a hundred small decisions. Which track opens. What follows the peak. When they pull the energy back down. That judgment is a huge part of [what makes a great DJ](/blog/what-makes-a-great-dj), and you can only really absorb it by listening a lot.

You start hearing set structure. A good mix has a shape, and it helps to know [how a DJ set is structured](/blog/what-is-a-dj-set) before you listen. It builds, it plateaus, it dips, it climbs again, and it lands somewhere.

Once you notice that shape, you cannot unnotice it. You will start hearing where a DJ is taking you twenty minutes before they get there, and your own sets will stop feeling like a random pile of good tracks.

And because it is just enjoyable. Not everything has to be homework. Some of the best listening you will do this year is a long organic house set playing quietly while you cook, or a Boiler Room set at full volume on a Friday afternoon.

Where to Find the Best DJ Mixes

Every platform is good at something different. If you are wondering where to find DJ mixes that suit how you actually listen, here is the honest breakdown.

YouTube

YouTube is the biggest and the easiest. You get the visuals, the crowd, the DJ's hands, and comment sections that often contain the entire tracklist.

It is also searchable in a way the other platforms are not. If you want a specific genre, a specific year, or a specific festival, YouTube will find it.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud is where the DJ community itself lives. Working DJs, small labels and residents post sets there constantly, and a lot of it never makes it anywhere else.

Follow twenty DJs you like and your SoundCloud feed becomes the best mix radio you have. Just know that copyright takedowns do happen there, so mixes occasionally vanish.

Mixcloud

Mixcloud is the licensed option. It pays royalties through PRS and PPL and has direct deals with Universal, Warner and the independent agency Merlin, which is why long radio-style shows survive there when they get pulled elsewhere.

It also runs a weekly editorial roundup of mixes worth hearing, which is a solid way to find things outside your usual lane.

Boiler Room

Boiler Room is the format that changed how the world watches DJs. Small room, crowd pressed up against the booth, camera in the middle of it, no stage production to hide behind.

The brand is still touring hard in 2026, with dates across Washington DC, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Osaka, Warsaw and Amsterdam, and the full archive sits on YouTube for free.

Live-Stream Series

HOR Berlin streams sets from its white-tiled Kreuzberg studio six days a week, one DJ, no crowd, nowhere to hide. It is the purest test of selection I know of.

Cercle takes the opposite approach and films DJs in extraordinary locations, from museums to mountainsides. Ten years in, and its 2026 festival took over the Musee de l'Air et de l'Espace outside Paris.

The Mixmag Lab has been filming intimate sets since 2012 and now travels, with 2026 editions running in London, Jakarta, Hong Kong and Dhaka. The Lot Radio broadcasts out of a converted shipping container in Brooklyn, and Book Club Radio does something similar with a warmer, looser feel.

Radio Show Archives

The BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix has been running since 1993. Two uninterrupted hours from one artist, every week, hosted by Pete Tong, and the archive on BBC Sounds is a genuine education in dance music history.

NTS Radio broadcasts around the clock across two channels from more than 70 cities, with over 600 resident hosts and tens of thousands of archived shows free to stream. Rinse FM, the London and Paris station that started as a pirate in 1994, offers full listen-back. Resident Advisor still publishes the RA Podcast and a daily Mix of the Day. For the British names who shaped that radio culture, see my list of [the greatest UK DJs](/blog/best-uk-djs-of-all-time).

Best DJ Mixes on YouTube

YouTube DJ mixes give you something audio-only platforms cannot: you get to watch the work. You see the hand reach for the EQ, the head nod that means the next track is loaded, the moment the DJ realizes the room is with them.

If you are learning, that visual layer is worth a lot. Reading a description of a bassline swap is nothing next to watching someone do one.

These are the channels I would point anyone at for the best DJ sets to watch.

Boiler Room for the sheer breadth of the archive and the closeness of the crowd.

HOR Berlin for stripped back, no-frills selection, six days a week.

Cercle for long, cinematic sets in places you will never otherwise see, usually melodic house, organic house and techno.

The Mixmag Lab for tightly filmed club sets with a strong focus on the music rather than the production.

The Lot Radio and Book Club Radio for eclectic, community-feeling sets from Brooklyn.

UKF Drum & Bass, fifteen years deep and well past a billion streams on the channel, for anything bass-driven.

MoBlack Records for Afro House straight from one of the genre's defining labels.

Mixmag also publishes a rolling roundup of the best DJ mixes of the year, updated through 2026, which is a fast way to find things you would never stumble on yourself.

Best DJ Mixes by Genre

House is the broadest church here, running from deep and soulful through disco-tinged to peak-time tech house. Start with the Essential Mix archive if you want the classics, then move to NTS and Rinse for what is happening now.

Afro House has gone from niche to central. It climbed from 24th to 4th among the most-searched styles on Beatport, and its biggest records now reach far outside club audiences.

The sound is built on layered percussion, deep rolling basslines, soulful vocals and a lot of space. Black Coffee, Keinemusik, Shimza, Caiiro, Vanco and Francis Mercier are [the names worth digging into](/blog/best-afro-house-djs), and the MoBlack Records channel is a reliable entry point.

For more, see my [afro house mixes roundup](/blog/best-afro-house-mixes) or my [latin house mix guide](/blog/best-latin-house-mixes). I also post Afro House mixes on my own channel, which I will come back to at the end.

Latin House sits at the meeting point of house rhythms and Latin percussion, vocals and phrasing. HUGEL is the artist most credited with pushing it globally off the back of "Morenita," and he is back with a residency at Hi Ibiza in 2026.

It is warm, groove-led and made for rooms that want to dance rather than stare at the booth. This is the other half of what I play.

Techno covers a huge spread now, from hypnotic and stripped back to fast and hard. HOR Berlin is the best single place to sample the range, since it runs different DJs and different sub-styles almost every day.

Drum and bass runs around 170 to 175 BPM and splits into liquid, jump-up, jungle and darker dancefloor styles. UKF Drum & Bass and Hospital Records are the two obvious channels, and Hospital in particular has been shaping the melodic, high-energy end of the genre for over two decades.

Hip hop mixes are a different discipline. Less about long blends, more about cuts, doubles, scratching and knowing exactly which sixteen bars to play.

SoundCloud and Mixcloud are the strongest places to dig here, since so much of it comes from working club DJs rather than brands. Boiler Room's archive also holds a lot of it.

How to Use DJ Mixes to Improve Your Own DJing

Passive listening is fine. Active listening is where the improvement happens.

Listen once for pleasure, then again with a pen. The first pass is just enjoyment. On the second pass, note the moments that moved you and mark roughly when they happened.

You are looking for surprise. Anywhere you thought "how did they get there from that" is a lesson waiting.

Watch how tracks are ordered. Ask why each track follows the one before it. Is it energy, is it key, is it a shared vocal or drum pattern, is it a deliberate contrast?

Most sets are built from small runs of two or three tracks that belong together, joined by a bridge. Once you spot the runs, you can start building your own.

Break down the transitions. Rewind the blends you liked and work out the mechanics. Was it a long EQ swap, a quick cut on the phrase, an echo throw, a bassline swap?

If any of that vocabulary is new, my guide to [DJ transitions](/blog/dj-transitions-how-to-blend-tracks-smoothly) covers the core techniques properly. And if you are still fighting the beats rather than the blend, start with [how to beatmatch](/blog/how-to-beatmatch) instead.

Track the energy curve. Try mapping a set roughly by ear: where it opened, where it first lifted, where it dipped, where the peak sat. You will notice good DJs pull back far more often than beginners expect.

That restraint is usually the difference between a set that exhausts a room and one that keeps it.

How to Find New Music From DJ Mixes

Hearing a track you love and losing it forever is one of the more painful DJ experiences. Here is how to avoid it.

Use track ID tools. 1001Tracklists is the biggest crowdsourced database of DJ set tracklists, and it covers most large festival sets, radio shows and streams. Check there first.

Shazam and SoundHound work well on clean single tracks but struggle inside a mix, where crossfades, EQ and loops confuse them. They are worth a shot during a clear passage, not much use during a blend.

Read the comments. YouTube and SoundCloud comment sections are genuinely useful. Someone has usually asked for the ID at your exact timestamp, and someone else has usually answered.

Reddit's r/IDthisTrack is the fallback when nothing else works. Post a clip with a timestamp and be patient.

Follow the labels, not just the artists. When you find one track you love, look at who released it. Labels have a house sound, so a label that put out one record you like probably has forty more. Following labels is the single highest-return habit for building a crate.

Save everything immediately. Keep one running note, playlist or crate for IDs. Do it the moment you hear the track, not later, because later never comes.

Listen to DJ Rikstar's Mixes

I post Afro House and Latin House mixes on my YouTube channel, roughly once a week.

Expect deep percussion, warm basslines and vocals, plenty of Latin rhythm, and sets built to move rather than to show off. Full tracklists go in every description, so if you hear something you want, you do not have to hunt for it.

If you are learning, feel free to treat them as study material. Pull them apart, steal the transitions, and go build something better.

FAQ

Where can I listen to DJ mixes for free? YouTube, SoundCloud, Mixcloud, NTS Radio and BBC Sounds all offer huge libraries of DJ mixes at no cost. YouTube is the easiest starting point because it is searchable and you get the video as well as the audio.

What is the best platform for DJ mixes? It depends what you want. YouTube is best for watching sets, SoundCloud is best for following working DJs, and Mixcloud is best for long radio-style shows that stay online because it is fully licensed.

How do DJs record their mixes? Most record straight from the mixer or controller into their DJ software or a DAW, capturing the master output as a single audio file. For video, they run a screen or camera capture alongside it, then sync the two in an editor before uploading.

How do I find the tracks in a DJ mix? Check the video or upload description first, then 1001Tracklists, then the comments. Shazam can catch individual tracks during clean sections, and Reddit's r/IDthisTrack is a good last resort.

Are DJ mixes legal to listen to? Listening is fine. The legal complexity sits with whoever uploads the mix, which is why Mixcloud pays royalties through PRS and PPL and holds direct deals with the major labels, and why mixes sometimes disappear from less strictly licensed platforms.

Keep Digging

The habit matters more than the platform. Pick two or three channels, listen properly, note what surprises you, and go find the records.

If Afro House and Latin House are your thing, subscribe to [DJ Rikstar on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@DJRikstar). New mixes go up most weeks, tracklists included.