DARRYL DUMANLANG

Psounds, post: 10434 wrote: “do you want to get paid or not” What happened to DJ’ing for the love of the music?

Listen to this song to know what I think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvTFKAlXwRs

Agreed, and I do dj for the love of the music, but I also depend on dj’ing as a source of income that’s getting me through school right now, so money does play a big part. I imagine and hope most dj’s start dj’ing because they love the music. But, if you find yourself wanting to be more than a bedroom dj and want to get into the bar/club scene, you have to understand that you’re not playing just for yourself anymore and that there’s a crowd involved and, as a dj, you are being paid to entertain the crowd. The trick is to find a crowd/scene/venue where you could enjoy the music you’re spinning while making money at the same time. What I was trying to say in that comment was that if you play music that the general crowd is familiar to, basically the top-40 stuff on the radio, then you’ll probably have more opportunities to find paying gigs. Luckily for me, I personally don’t mind spinning top-40 remixes and can get into my mixes when playing mainstream music. But I’ve also had experiences where I get tired of top-40 and switch up into genres I love, but isn’t right for the crowd…my mixes were super clean, my song choices for that genre were awesome, and I was having a blast, yet a lot of people walked off the dancefloor and didn’t get back on till I backtracked and played “Party Rock Anthem”. If I’m playing at a club and there’s that one song I’m tired of, but everyone and their little sister is coming up to the booth to request, I’m gonna suck it up and play it. It’s, what?, 2-3 minutes of one track you don’t like?…not that big of a deal if it gets your crowd going. You might see it as “selling out” or whatever, but to me, it’s not; I enjoy moving the crowd to music they like as much as I enjoy jamming to my own music that I like at home…I apologize if this was more of a rant, but its just my view of it.

No it’s not wrong, but if that’s what you’re paid to play it’s what you should stick to for the majority of your set…with that being said I’d say most clubs/bars (at least in Chicago) are looking for top-40/mainstream dj’s, so the question is: Do you want to get paid or not?

The most annoying for me is the one that requests a song and then after you play it, comes back with a list of 20 written on a napkin… Then if you don’t have it they’ll ask if you can hook up their iphone lol. Requests don’t really bother me, but this is an exception. No tips I might add.