With the mainstream flow of interest in all things EDM, over the past couple of years everyone has become a DJ. I don’t use the term ‘everyone’ lightly at all either. I truly think that if you were trying to pick up a girl in a bar, she would be more impressed if you let her know, in passing, that you didn’t DJ. In saying that, there is a whopping90% chance that the very same girl you’re trying to pick up is actually a DJ herself. So whats her story? Six months ago she was a club promoter who complained about the ‘shitty music played by the shitty DJs’ in the club. One day she decided that DJing was her lifelong dream, something she had been adamant about doing since she was just 10 years old. She went to her guy friends house and got a few quick lessons on how to match up the numbers on both CDJ’s. On the way home, she bought some leopard print tights and a low cut top and got an edgy haircut. Now, both technically and aesthetically, she was the next big thing.
All of this was good, but a club promoter who didn’t give a crap about music and only cared about how many people she was going to bring in was necessary. Turns out this was the easiest part of the equation, with 90% of club promoters following this model of business when choosing a DJ. A mere three weeks from deciding she would take up DJing, she had lathered herself up with cocktails and rocked out her first DJ set. It was bad and the track selection was evidently done by her pet cat, but she brought a tonne of friends in and they all danced. At the conclusion of her set, the promoter gave her another gig the following week and tried to take her home. The next day she made a Facebook page and posted sexy photos of herself and got 200 new fans. Demographically, 72% of these fans joined the page to see if there were more photos of this hot scantily clad female. The rest are her friends, who won’t ever tell her she can’t mix.
This influx is painful to watch, but it really does make the female DJ’s who CAN mix stand out. They are a sought after commodity and rightfully so. There are just as many bad male DJs, perhaps more, but they have more trouble leveraging their looks with straight, 26 year old male club promoters.
