Oh F*ck, Really?
CousinLarry
4,618 Posts
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/nyregion/08dj.htmlApril 8, 2009Instead of Falling Into a Rut, Busting Out a New GrooveBy VINCENT M. MALLOZZIChanning Sanchez, who lost his job in January, has found a way to mix business with pleasure.Mr. Sanchez, 51, was a jewelry salesman at Tiffany & Co., on Fifth Avenue, for 23 years. After hearing what has become a familiar phrase ??? ???You???re being laid off??? ??? he put himself on a different sort of track to future employment: he is training to become a D.J.???I used to spin records 30 years ago,??? Mr. Sanchez, headset in hand, said the other day just before he began another session at a turntable. ???Now that the stress of losing my job is gone, this a fun and creative way to make some extra money.???Within minutes, Mr. Sanchez and several other aspiring D.J.???s were sliding into their stations to scratch records and mix songs at dubspot, an electronic music production and D.J. school in Manhattan, where enrollment ??? now 300 ??? has doubled since it opened last year, largely because of the economic downturn.???I???m getting a lot of calls from people who are saying, ???I just got my severance package, and this is something I have wanted to do my whole life,??? ??? said Kelly Webb, dubspot???s director of operations. ???In the midst of this economic crisis, some people have simply decided to go out and do what really makes them happy.???That description certainly fits Tom Macari, 26, who was until last month an information technology manager at Frederic Fekkai in Manhattan.???I used to D.J. at parties when I was 16, and I???m still young enough to get back in the business,??? he said. ???I used to mix records and CDs, but now most D.J.???s are downloading songs from computers, which is why I needed to take this course.???Rob Principe, the founder and chief executive of Scratch DJ Academy in Manhattan, said that his company had also seen an increase in enrollment.???This year as opposed to last, we are up 18 percent,??? Mr. Principe said. ???When the going gets tough, people tend to go back to things that they are really interested in doing, whether that is to pursue something like this as a hobby or as an alternate means of income.???Dan Giove, the president and founder of dubspot, where a five-month course costs $1,695.00, said that a D.J., depending on experience and venue, can make anywhere from $50 to $1,000 an event.???You can absolutely make a living as a D.J.,??? he said. ???In fact, we are seeing some of our students going out there and finding themselves decent-paying gigs.???Mr. Giove pointed to April White, a 30-year-old account supervisor at a public relations firm in Manhattan who is so worried about losing her job that she has already put Plan B in motion.???I???ve been gigging like mad,??? said Ms. White, who has been working at bars and other event spaces around the city, including at a bar called Mr. West, where she was spinning her vinyl one evening.???My company has laid off 10 percent of its staff, and all the worrying about losing my job has put me at a weird crossroads in my life,??? she said. ???I love music, and I was always the first one on the dance floor, and so I knew when D.J.???s were really killing it, or when they were totally bombing ??? and I always thought I???d be pretty good at it.???Another dubspot student, Marcia Levine, 53, an account executive for a television network in Manhattan, recently landed her first gig. On May 1, she will work a fund-raiser at a Manhattan public school, where students from kindergarten through fifth grade will pay $20 each to hear her spin Top 40 tunes.???I???m so excited,??? said Ms. Levine, who said she used to frequent Studio 54. ???I don???t know what I???m getting paid, but just to know that I???ll be getting some form of payment to do something I really love is a great start.???Ms. White said that even people who still have a job are wise to start thinking about another line of work ??? nothing is certain these days.???What do you have to lose at this point,??? Ms. White said. ???I???m doing everything I can to hold down my job, but at least now I???ve created a potential exit strategy.???
Comments
is it true they have turntable sheet music?
This has already happened to me twice since xmas.
One wedding gig evaporated when the couple requested that I play for 8 hours straight for a sum total of $500, which was what they were being offered by a non-DJ friend.
I'm sayin'. There's always been a risk of that, but the high price of entry into the game kept a lot dudes at bay. Things done changed, though.
Who's got the OG Premier microwave DJ quote lined up?
That was more like 6 years ago and if you look around today, at least about half the DJs are "playing" mp3s...
People get what they pay for.
Yeah, sometimes they just sound bad from the start. I got an email this week.
"Getting married in July, VA Beach, mom's back yard on the water."
Nice! You guys can picket outside weddings where Becky's co-worker
Brad is playing shit off his i-pod for $75 and free booze.
Yeah, my man in NYC has said the same thing but it's such an uphill climb to try to organize, essentially, freelancers who don't all work in the same venues. Then again, I guess in some cities, bartenders are organized and that's a vaguely similar kind of challenge.
In the immortal words of DeadMau5:
???I don???t really see the technical merit in playing two songs at the same speed together, and it bores me to f*cking tears. I???d like [DJs to] dis-a-f*cking-pear. It???s so middleman. They???re like f*cking lawyers. You need them, but they???re all f*cking cunts.???
http://www.laweekly.com/2009-04-02/music/the-last-dance/1
The Last Dance: Is the Superstar-DJ Era Over?
Chris Davison
At the indie-meets-dance club Echoplex in Echo Park, DJs spin, but just as often these days a floor-friendly sound will emerge in the form of a band, a laptop act or something in between, as was the case with Love Grenades on a recent winter night.
The quartet???s three frontwomen dressed up like pinup girls, opera-length gloves and all, and cooed and sang in a correspondingly sultry haze, complemented by ???80s-inflected musicians on bass, guitar, drums and sequencer. The Grenades??? dance-punk sound has been remixed by friend-of-the-band Sam Sparro, another local artist who has skipped deejaying on the way to dance-floor stardom. Love Grenades don???t deejay, but their recent single, ???Tigers in the Fire,??? is being peddled on DJ culture???s No. 1 online retailer, Beatport. Clubland is being invaded by artists like these, dance-friendly acts that don???t need turntables to get their point across.
The dance world has been rocked in recent years by laptop-, sequencer- and band-based acts ranging from Justice and the Black Ghosts to Booka Shade. Daft Punk???s Kanye West???led resurrection last year highlighted the duo???s own immersive, turntable-free live act. And the local nu-electro festival HARD Haunted Mansion surpassed the 5,000-ticket mark in the fall with nary a superstar DJ in sight. All this has even some jocks asking if the spin is no longer in.
One of the hottest acts to emerge from the electronic???dance music arena in the past few years is Toronto-based producer Deadmau5, who got his start as a computer programmer before graduating to successful bedroom production. Because he came to deejaying from the tech-geek world, he faced culture shock on the club circuit. We can imagine him meeting all those douche jockeys caught up in drug-filled hazes of their own perceived stardom, egos stroked by groupies, guest lists and MySpace comments ??? all this stoke for, as Deadmau5 wrote on his own MySpace page, ???some dude??? who presses ???the ???play/stop??? button and occasionally move[s] a pitch slider.??? Late last year, Deadmau5 was interviewed by Irish Daily Star and gave a money quote heard around the DJ world: ???I don???t really see the technical merit in playing two songs at the same speed together, and it bores me to f*cking tears. I???d like [DJs to] dis-a-f*cking-pear. It???s so middleman. They???re like f*cking lawyers. You need them, but they???re all f*cking cunts.???
Here???s an artist whose music is required spinning for the biggest DJs, and he can???t hold his tongue (but his label can, and they declined to have him speak for this piece).
Deadmau5 admirer and former Angeleno Dave Dresden has worn many hats over the past two decades, including radio host, dance-music journalist, music scout for BBC Radio 1???s Pete Tong, and half of defunct DJ duo Gabriel & Dresden. He says Deadmau5 is right. ???The day of the DJ as a guy who plays other people???s records might be done,??? he says, pointing to newer acts like Morgan Page, who often play their own music live via laptop.
The superclub Avalon Hollywood has in recent years made more and more room for the post-DJ act while giving a cold shoulder to superstar DJs, especially those spinners who play straight-line hypnotic trance. While it still hosts plenty of big-name jocks ??? mostly of the minimal-techno variety ??? the venue has seen more than its share of hybrid live acts, including Booka Shade, Gui Boratto and Martin Buttrich.
???I don???t think it???s over, I think it???s evolving,??? Avalon co-owner Steve Adelman says of DJ culture. ???I think people are going more into electronic bands, live acts and semilive acts. We strive to have a whole production and visual experience that???s not just focused on watching a guy on two turntables.???
L.A.???s Frank Dominguez, a.k.a. down-tempo electronic act Aime, started deejaying 10 years ago but switched in recent years to incorporating nonturntable elements, such as keyboards, effects pads, a drum machine, a laptop and even an iPod. At 31, he plays for a generation of clubgoers more accustomed to the shuffle-play dynamics of an MP3 player than the ecstasy-fueled Botts??? dots of a superstar DJ. ???People now would much rather see an artist performing with more than just changing records back and forth,??? he says. ???The kids go with what???s more stimulating.???
Adelman, who???s been in the superstar-DJ-booking business since the mid-???90s, says those most affected by the demise of the name DJ are local ???midlevel??? spinners, not huge trance names like Ti??sto and Armin Van Buuren. URB magazine editor Joshua Glazer adds that some of the so-called midlevel DJs who had settled stateside around the DJ boom of the new millennium have gone back to Europe, replaced locally by nu-electro bands. Still, Glazer argues, the DJ isn???t going anywhere anytime soon.
???I think the reports of the death of the superstar DJ have been greatly exaggerated,??? he says. ???I was one of the first people to declare that death. But compared to five years ago, I definitely think the DJ is on the rise.???
He notes that cheap laptops and easy-to-use software, such as Microwave Scratch Live and Ableton Live, have made it easier than ever to deejay ??? virtually ??? for a new generation of point-and-click jocks. ???It might not be like 1999,??? Glazer says, ???but maybe we???re just not noticing.???
This guy is 26? He sounds like 71-year-old dad. "Downloading from computers!"
"Wait, they have the internet on computers now?"
I don't know why this is surprising to people. I'd be willing to bet that for most non-DJ-inclined people, they probably could care less. As long as the person plays the songs they want... really, some is some schmoe at a wedding really going to care about the technical accuracy of blending at the proper BPM?
A club - maybe. But for smaller stuff like that, I'm sure many are willing to save a few hundred bucks and still get the songs they want to hear.
haha...
not exactly. more like any venues that have promoters. not caring about weddings/mobile djs/ bars.
ive been in this game too long, and have seen just about all of it. djs come and go. over all rates are the same as they were for most djs since 1993. promoters come in, take the door + %10 of the bar, and pay the dj $250 ?!??!? and then to add the whole, dont play this, play that, play "mash ups".
a solid, consistent dj will build the night, then its on auto pilot. i say get rid of promoters.
not speaking for myself here...but thats the reality for local djs. theres tons of gigs i dont take for various reasons...but i hear the horror stories.
even the hotel cleaning workforce organized.
that article of the dj is over is garbage. live bands can play their own music....but have no idea how to play others peoples music, tastefully with skill, and really....club djing is about reading people.
programming is a skill thats developed over years of experience.
A ex-club DJ buddy-of-mine, in the mid 80s to early 90's started a union, pretty much ruled the scene he said, had all the clubs hiring his DJ's, and utilizing his equipment, and promotions. Even his records have rubber stampings of thier union stamped on the label.
Some circles know the difference btween a skilled dj and someone who just serves their favorite foods w/ zero curatorial decisions made.
DJ Shit will NEVER die.
Fusk a Band, Fusk a Rapper, F*ck a Singer.
game recognize game. Not every bar owner or club manager is an idiot and they usually know that it takes more than just a shuffled ipod playlist to make a night work.
So we got a bunch of dudes trying to DJ and a bunch of women trying to be strippers. Let's just have the dudes DJ at the strip clubs where these women are dancing and that should minimize the new jack impact on the current regular club equilibrium. Problem sloved!
I mean these poor little kids are going to pay $20 a pop to hear this lady 'spin'.
Doesn't anyone think about the children.
All these people who think DJing is "something they really love" will have their will tested early and often and most will fold like toilet paper the minute some clubgoer tells them how much they suck, or some douchey promoter or manager stiffs them.
DJing occasionally is one thing, doing it as your primary source of income is like any other career: f*cking hard work.
I wouldn't think you would be!
getting paid? It's a fundraiser, you dolt. You'll get paid free appetizers and some cocktails. You'll get paid a round of applause and a thank you in the school newsletter.
Undercutting working DJ's aside, do these people think they're going to just jump into paying jobs out the gate?