Balancing the scales between mainstream and underground
It’s tough to be an entertainer in this day and age. Nowadays, there are many many DJ’s and even more parties, festivals and other gigs where their sounds can be heard. This creates a lot of competition, but in our opinion it also creates a certain kind of sameness in the sound you hear coming from the turntables. This year we’ve heard many types of house mixed with mainstream pop artists, it appears it has become the summer staple this year. Things like tropical house synths and monster hit producing collaborations between famous artists and producers are very mainstream right now.
This means that if you’re a DJ and you are performing live for a mainstream crowd, you can’t just ignore these trends. In order to please your crowd you gotta take some of these hits into your selection, right? Ultimately, it’s your selection that determines whether your crowd likes you or not. While your skills like beat-matching, a sense of rhythm and timing should also be vital (not necessarily a prerequisite, as demonstrated in this article from 2013). The tunes that you choose to display to your crowd determine whether your set was memorable or not. In other words, what are you willing to play in order to please your crowd?
This begs the question, what about all that hidden gold you have in your playlists/CD-folders/USB-sticks? Would the crowd go berserk if I stopped playing ‘This Is What You Came For’ and spun let’s say, a Digital Mystikz track? Do I *have* to mix to half of Avicii’s discography in order for them to like me or would a couple of them appreciate this old Kaiju dub I have laying around? A popular rule of thumb for many entertainers we know is that you play a ‘popular’ playlist and requests up until it’s 22:30. After that point, most people will be at the very least a bit buzzed and as a result they care less about the music so you have more ‘freedom’ in your selection. Whether this still counts as ‘pleasing the crowd’ remains up for debate. We reckon that as a DJ, you have to juggle the balance between ‘crowd pleasing’ and ‘crowd education’.
Written by Navi — Signalfire.
