Quote:
Originally Posted by Fleaman  I agree with Zick, it's 2 different scenes/genres.
I myself know quite of bit of popular Dj's here....a lot of the biggest local ones and every single one of them admitted to me that Dj's are overrated.
One of them was all excited when he started playing in a band doing the portishead like scratching. I laughed and said that he won't last a month.
And to the day, after showing up to rehearsal 3x a week, setting up, breaking down, luggin equip and playing shows....all for no $$, he quite.
Many of the local ones here that make good $$ only spent a few months learning the craft...much longer collecting the vinyl of course....all the time making $$ at every gig, getting laid and only having to lug some vinyl around  |
You make fair points - it's all valid thumbsup
The thing with myself and my brother, we don't lug around heavy vinyl anymore, we moved over to CDJ's in 1997, transfered all our wax to cd's. We own around 20,000 plus vinyl between us, but many more cd's than that. We buy original music only, do not download - we pay our way. For our type of work (which involves lots of asian music too), CD's are the only way to stay in the game.
We treat DJ work more as a business these days (the love for music is still there though...which helps), so it's a different story to your average on and off DJ turning to producer. We work at 3-4 events / parties a week. Our work is 99% referral (no banners, flyers, etc) and we play many different genres of music, so it works well for us, we don't limit our music playing capacity. As a DJ, if you have been playing for a good number of years, you will also pick up alot along the way (musical taste, the bigger picture, not playing for yourself). Also what helps is that, we know most of our clients and vice versa. We own all our gear (lots of different rigs for small to large events), for the most part we have compacted our setup to a point where we are not breaking our backs...lol (very important for long term). As for the money side, being here in the UK, private DJ work (for the extreme high end market) has paid very well, more so than a typical 9-5 and some. Plus we do what we love best - music.
