Quote:
Quote:
as someone who plays both top 40 garbage sets and 5 hour underground dance music sets i will have to say that playing top40 garbage is much harder than programming a 5 hour set of underground dance music.
Then you are not doing it right. No way, no how is playing the hits, where the popularity of the music guides the energy - harder than playing 5 hours of music that no one knows....where you programming is the only thing that makes the night flow.
I played top 40 and hip hop for 15 years and that this is DEAD EASY compared to playing house or techno for an educated underground crowd.
oh no, I'm totally doing it right - I've been DJing EDM for over 10 years spanning many styles and genres from dnb to breaks to house to dubstep to garage, and many things in between. Hell, I often get paid to tour playing underground music to educated and music loving crowds that appreciate DJing.
That's what makes it so much easier - you're djing to a group of music lovers more often than not. These are people that actually care about music and therefore you get to play what you want and what you consider good and for the most part - unless you absolutely suck - it's a pretty easy gig since you're playing good music all night. On top of that, many times you've already got a baseline in a style or genre to work from. Techno heads are going to a techno show to expect to hear techno - so long as you have good taste in techno and can hold a mix, you're probably going to do well. If you produce or are in good with producers and can secure a bunch of exclusives, even better...
Top 40 crowds are bitches. Straight up. But they are fickle and it's so much easier to lose a dance floor within a song than it is any sort of underground set - you have to think much further ahead, be ready to change shit at a moments notice, and on top of that, you have to put a lot of your own preferences aside to please the crowd. Sure you can play the hits and probably not mix a thing and still please a few of the donkeys, but to play to a top 40 crowd *well* is imo a much, much harder task than playing for any educated dj crowd.
Do I prefer to play to an educated, music-loving crowd? Always - I'm trying to move my career in that direction where I can just ditch the top40 djing entirely but you're fooling yourself if you think it's a harder gig. It's a harder gig to make money from sure, but is it a harder gig to DJ? No way.
