Share, import or change location of iTunes library?

I've recently bought a brand new iMac to use exclusively for music, photo and video editing. It's on the same network as my old iMac. I want to avoid using up virgin storage space as much as possible so I've shared my iTunes library from my old mac but on my new mac I can only see music I've purchased from Apple, located on cloud; all my self-imported/created music is not available. I understand this is the way it works, unless I'm missing something. I could just copy the whole library over or import it but I want to avoid that if possible, especially if I then get a load of duplicates. One option I'm thinking of is to change the location of my music library on my new mac, so its source is my old mac - Music/settings/Files/Music Media folder location/Change. Has anyone had experience of doing this successfully?