What Is a Track ID? ID - ID, Dubplates, White Labels

"ID" is short for identification. When someone writes "ID?" or "track ID at 1:12:30?" under a mix, they are asking for two facts: who made the track and what it is called. With those two facts you can find the record in a store, stream it, or put it in your own set.

The request is as old as DJing, but the word has shifted. DJ Mag's feature on the track ID debate says the term "once felt like an in-crowd calling card" and has since been adopted by tracklist sites such as 1001Tracklists "to describe an artist playing any unreleased song". So the word now carries two meanings, and both are in daily use:

• The question. "ID?" means "what is this track?", whether or not the track is released.
• The placeholder. "ID" in a tracklist means "nobody has named this yet", which usually points to music that is not out.

If your track is simply one you do not recognize, the practical route is in our guide to identifying a track in a DJ mix. The rest of this page covers the second meaning: why some tracks stay nameless, and what happens to them.

Tracklists are written as Artist - Title, often with the label after it. "ID" replaces whichever part is missing, so you can read the three common forms directly:

• ID - ID: unknown artist, unknown title. Nobody who worked on that tracklist could name the track.
• Artist - ID: the artist is known, usually because the DJ is playing their own music or said whose it was, and the title is not public.
• ID - Title or Artist - Title (ID Remix): a title or an original is recognized, and the artist or remixer is not.

Tracklist databases are built by people. The 1001Tracklists FAQ says guests can make suggestions on tracklist pages, that a user reaches the level that can submit tracklists by correctly identifying five tracks, and that the site manually validates tracks after they have been played in tracklists. An "ID - ID" row is therefore a statement about what those contributors know on that day, and it can change.

MixTracklist is honest about the same limit. When you paste a SoundCloud set at /scan, every track we can name gets a timestamp and a confidence score from 0 to 100 on a colored badge: lime is high (75 and up), amber is in between, and gray is low and worth checking by ear. A "Double match" label means two independent matches agreed. Music that has never been released or cataloged anywhere stays unidentified in the result. No tool can name a recording that exists in no catalog.

Producers and the DJs close to them play tracks long before release: to test a mixdown on a club system, to see how a crowd reacts, or to build demand. During that window the track exists as a file on a few USB sticks and nowhere else.

That is also why recognition apps go quiet. Apple's support page on adding music to the Shazam catalog says music gets into the catalog through an Apple-approved distributor, and that content such as mash-up tracks and viral track edits from platforms like SoundCloud and YouTube may be hidden. A track with no distributor and no release has nothing in the catalog to match against. The mechanics are covered in how music recognition works.

A well documented example: Mixmag reported on January 17, 2024 that Joy Orbison's "flight fm" came out that day on XL Recordings, after he first played it at Lost Village in summer 2023 and Four Tet played it at Manchester's Warehouse Project. For roughly half a year, anyone hearing it in a set could only write "ID".

If this is your situation, follow the steps in how to find an unreleased track ID.

Before USB sticks, the unreleased track was a dubplate. In Red Bull Music Academy's 2014 feature on dubplate culture, DJ Hype defines it: "A dubplate is a one-off pressing of a record that is made out of acetate and metal." He describes it as a way of testing a song that Jamaican soundsystem clash culture turned into "a one-off song that no one else has got". In the same piece David Rodigan calls dubplates "customised recordings that only you could play".

DJ Mag's 2023 history of UK dubplate culture fills in the rest. The "acetate" is really an aluminium disc coated with nitrocellulose lacquer. The practice was born in Jamaican sound system culture and brought to the UK by sound systems such as Sir Coxsone Sound. London cutting house Music House, which has been turning out dubplates since 1985, became the meeting point of the jungle scene, where DJs queued for cuts of tracks that producers supplied on DAT; Transition in Forest Hill later did the same job for dubstep.

The same article records the end of that era. Fabio recalls paying £65 to cut a Photek track in the late 2000s, then arriving at the club to find the warm-up DJ playing it off a CD. It also records a revival: newer lathes cut into plastic blanks that, according to cutting engineer Borai, last about as long as vinyl, where acetate "will wear out eventually".

The habit outlived the format. An "ID - ID" in a 2026 tracklist is the descendant of a plate only one DJ owned.

A white label is a record with a blank or near-blank center label. MEOKO's history of white label vinyl traces the 12-inch white label to disco, where it was a promotional copy sent to press and radio before the artwork existed, or a test pressing of a coming release. By the 1980s, the piece says, 12-inch promos had become "a currency" that distributors dropped into record shops to create a buzz ahead of the release date. For small independent labels, whites were also "the cheapest and fastest way to distribute product", and a rubber stamp was the quickest way to put an identifier on them.

So a white label could mean three different things: a test pressing, a promo for DJs and press, or the actual release of a label with no budget for print. In each case the DJ in the booth knew what it was and the dancefloor did not.

Some DJs made sure of that. DJ Mag's track ID feature describes the era when DJs would black out artist information on white labels with permanent markers "to keep their secret weapons just that". The idea is older than house music: in Red Bull Music Academy's oral history of northern soul, Ian Levine says the first record to be "covered up" was Bobby Paterson's "What a Wonderful Night for Love", hidden by DJ Rob Bellars at Manchester's Twisted Wheel, and Kev Roberts says cover-ups began "because DJs were so protective of their finds".

Not every ID is a future release. Many are altered versions of known records, and the vocabulary matters when you go looking. Digital DJ Tips' explainer by Phil Morse separates them like this:

• Re-edit: a version of a track with small changes "that could have been done by anyone", such as a longer intro or a rearranged breakdown.
• Mashup: more than one song melded together to create something new, typically one track's vocal over another's instrumental.
• Bootleg: an unauthorized version that radically changes an existing song, for instance into a different genre or tempo.
• Remix: a fully authorized new version made by a producer who adds their own elements.

A VIP is a fifth case. In Toolroom Records' note on VIP edits, label manager Matt Smallwood says a VIP is a "variation in production": similar to an edit, not enough of a change to be a remix, and normally only done by the original artist.

Only the authorized remix is certain to reach stores. Bootlegs and mashups use material their makers do not own, so they circulate as free downloads or stay on the DJ's drive, and the Apple page cited above lists mash-ups and viral edits among content that may be hidden from the Shazam catalog. In practice an app will often name the original under the edit. That is a real lead: search the original's title plus "edit" or "bootleg" and the DJ's name on SoundCloud and Bandcamp.

DJs withhold IDs for a handful of reasons, and DJ Mag's feature lets them say so in their own words:

• Status. DJ Cosworth compares it to limited stock in fashion: playing an unreleased tune is "a nice nod to being like: 'I have this tune'". Ed Lloyd, who worked for the company that grew out of the Identification of Music Facebook group, says ID culture "has put a premium on being the first to play a particular track".
• Work. A DJ who spent years digging for a record may not want to hand the result to every other DJ in one comment.
• It is not theirs to name. The track may be unsigned, untitled, or waiting on a label's schedule, and announcing it is the producer's call.

The same feature gives the other side. Dr Dubplate of the ec2a label, who says he comes "from the ultimate gatekeeper era", now tries to free up IDs because tunes are there to be shared. Naming a track credits its producer and can send buyers their way. Secrecy has a cost too: the article notes copies of "flight fm" fetching over £100 on the resale market, money that goes to resellers, not to the artist.

Neither side is going away, so treat a withheld ID as a normal outcome and not an insult. How to ask for a track ID covers how to ask in a way that gets answers.

An ID usually ends in one of four ways:

1. The track is released. It gets a title, a label and a store page; tracklist contributors replace "ID - ID" with the real name; recognition apps start to match it because it is now in their catalogs. "flight fm" followed this path between summer 2023 and January 2024.
2. Someone recognizes it. A listener knows the record, or knows the original under an edit, and posts it. DJ Mag describes one such listener, DJ Bigos, whose name is "almost always in the comments" with detailed tracklists of the mix you are hearing.
3. The DJ or producer names it, in a reply, a radio show tracklist, or a release announcement.
4. It never comes out. Mixmag's list of unreleased tracks that need an official release, published in March 2017, includes DMZ vs MZN's "Justice Day", of which, "as the story goes, there are only 2 copies", and an Âme remix that a fan petition failed to get released.

Because most IDs resolve through release, time is your best tool. Save the set link and the timestamp, then look again in a few months. Once a track is named, MixTracklist helps in a different way: every track in our free library has its own page listing the sets it was played in, with the timestamp in each, so you can hear how other DJs used it. For the wider picture of who builds tracklists and where to find them, see DJ set tracklists.

We think the honest position is the useful one: an ID is a track whose name is not public yet, most of them become public, and the ones that never do are part of what makes a recorded set worth replaying.