DJs are getting paid less money than ever to DJ in the club. Some DJs get paid $150 for 5 hours or less. What is going on? Well, the short answer is technology has made DJing easier so the barrier of entry for DJing is lower. So, there’s way more DJs out there. Thus, competition is driving down DJ rates.
DJing is an attractive pursuit. DJs like Tiesto, Calvin Harris and DJ Khaled are huge. Everyone has been to a party and seen a DJ look cool. The youth want to be cool, get money and get chicks (if they’re a straight male) and DJing seems like an easy way to do that.
This is where the disconnect happens. If young DJs’ motives are not pure, for example if they’re not in it because they love music, love the act of DJing, love people and love to see people dance, that’s where everything falls apart. If their motives are impure, they won’t respect the art of DJing and they’ll abuse the “sync” button, won’t know how to use vinyl, won’t practice, won’t learn how to open clubs properly and they’ll undercut real DJs for $50 at the club.
This has literally happened to me before. I was the resident DJ at a lounge for weeks. The manager liked me because he was a former DJ and he respected my skills. They brought on a new promoter with a big crowd who had his own DJ who was easier on their budget. The manager told me to show up to their first night because if the DJ sucked he would put me back on. Sure enough, trashville lol. They had a full crowd early at 10pm and the DJ was sitting at a table, not facing the crowd, playing songs that nobody liked and people were leaving. She had no awareness on how to DJ properly. About an hour into her set the manager and the promoter yanked her off the turntables and put me in. I rocked the set. A great time was had by all. I’m a fair guy. I gave the other DJ some of the money I got from the gig. I believe that DJs should be caretakers for the art form so I offered to mentor her as a DJ. She said no, she didn’t need it because she DJ’d for Lil’ Boosie the night before. Cap. That was laughable.
That precise attitude of new DJs is the problem. They want all the money, fame, clout and accolades without putting in the work. I’ve been DJing for over 15 years. I came up in the laptop era but I still learned how to DJ on vinyl with no laptop just for the sake of the art. I went to a DJ school called Beat Refinery and practiced DJing for 1,000’s of man hours. I opened up for DJ Money of 93.9 WKYS in clubs and shadowed him for years before I really started getting my own gigs and getting paid. I discovered Logic and DJ’d for him and helped put him on for years too. I earned my stripes. There’s a reason I get paid thousands of dollars to DJ a gig now. You have to earn it. And, that’s the problem. These kids don’t want to earn anything. They want a shortcut. If we don’t change the culture, we might lose the art of DJing forever.
Boss Review 