Dec182011
Several years ago, I decided to give a little something back to the DJing community and put on a DJ competition event. It was during a time when I had entered plenty of live DJ competitions myself and I felt it was a really good way of helping to publicise and promote up and coming DJs.
At the time of the competition, just as it is today, it was a struggle for any unknown DJ to get any bookings without some kind of credibility behind them. I thought that a DJ competition that would give participants the kudos required as well as a prize of a DJ set somewhere so they get to play out live. It’s also just a really nice thing to do. There was no commercial gain or leverage for myself that I got out of this, I just had a lot of fun doing it and I was able to make a few good contacts in the process.
What follows is a list of the things I learned from running this competition over the course of two months and is based on my own personal experiences.
Prizes
Get yourself some good prizes. I managed to find a custom slipmat company who kindly agreed to make a pair of customised slipmats for each placed participant. So I had a pair of “3rd place” slipmats in a bronze colour, a pair of silver coloured “2nd place” ‘mats and a pair of gold “1st place” ‘mats too. It was a nice touch.
I knew a DJ agency at the time who agreed to take on board the winner of the competition in return for a little exposure and promotion of their brand. I added their logo to the flyers and promotional material and held the competition in association with them. It was a good partnership as we were able to offer a top prize of a place on a DJ agency roster for the winner.
I approached a few other companies to try and blag some free stuff too. I managed to get £150 in vouchers from Hard To Find records and UDG sent me a large camouflage DJ bag to give away which was a great prize to be able to offer!
Perhaps I got lucky but I found it fairly easy to get companies to send stuff in for prizes. I made sure I did my research to find the right person to contact in each company and send them a personal email, later followed up with a phone call. You will more chance of a response if you address your letter/email by name rather than a “Dear Sir/Madam”. A few companies such as Vestax and Technics turned me down but that’s only to be expected - not everyone will want to work with you. Make sure you use all the contacts you have and any people you know to beg, steal and borrow prizes for your event. The better the prizes, the more interest you will attract and the bigger your event. If you feel it is necessary, then get a small contract drawn up between yourself and the company supplying the prize so that they don’t change their mind at the last minute.
Venue
The location of your DJ competition is very important. It really helps if the venue is local to you and you have a good relationship with the manager. Perhaps they are a friend, or you know them on first name terms or something. Approaching a venue cold in order to run a DJ competition is a lot more difficult. When you pitch the idea to the manager you should offer to run the competition mid week on one of the venue’s less busy week nights. I found that a Tuesday or Wednesday night is best. You should explain to the manager what it is you want to do and tell them that for every DJ that plays there will be a load of their thirsty friends turning up for the event too. Pubs and bars are the best to approach for things like this - nightclub specific venues are likely to turn you away.
Don’t bullshit or oversell it, but the important thing to let the manager know is that you will be boosting their slow mid-week trade on a regular basis for the next 7 weeks as well as getting press coverage in the local papers too. If you have a plan, some examples of posters and if you have any prizes already secured then this should all be included in your pitch to the manager. If you get lucky the manager may even let you and your judges have a few cheeky free beers during each night.
Make sure the venue can supply a microphone or you bring one along yourself as you will need to announce to the DJs when to start and also to talk to the crowd to inform them of what is going on too. There are likely to be guests in the venue who didn’t come along to watch the DJ competition but who now want to watch and get involved.
Posters
No one will enter the DJ competition if they don’t know it’s happening so get yourself some A3 posters (or larger) made up and put them around the venue. Yes, it’s possible to fly post them around town but not only is this illegal, it’s also not the best use of your time. The people who are most likely to enter the competition and who are most likely to attend as punters are people who go to the venue already. Put a few posters up around the seated areas indoors, around and in the DJ booth and most importantly in the window of the venue. Liaise with the manager as to appropriate placement of the posters and don’t put posters up with sellotape - the manager was quite fond of their wallpaper till I started ripping out large chunks of it. Oops.
Any bar worth knowing will be happy to pay for the printing of the posters for you. After all it is to promote a night for them. Don’t let them make you pay for printing posters. Make sure you put the full address of the venue somewhere on the poster too so that it is 100% clear where the event is taking place.
Make sure you include all the logos of each of your sponsors on the poster nice and big. If you don’t have much room, then whoever donates the better prizes give them more space on the poster. Keep the poster simple. If I remember, my poster had “DJ COMPETITION” in block caps across the top, a picture of a turntable and something like “pick up an entry form at the bar”. Also on the poster were the prizes on offer and a closing date for entries. Don’t put too much info on the poster and don’t use really small text either. People just wont read it. Print the poster in full colour too. If you can get away with sizes larger than A3 then all the better!
Application forms
These can be small A5 pieces of paper, black and white printed forms for DJs to enter the competition. Keep these on or behind the bar and make sure the bar staff know where they are if anyone asks for a form. As an option you can also have an online form for people to apply but paper is the best way forwards with this. It’s important you have a record of the names and contact details of each of the entrants so you should ask for at least the following information:
- DJ Name
- Real Name
- Phone Number
- Email
- Music style/genre
- I will be using: Vinyl / CD / Laptop (tick)
- Today’s Date.
- Signature
You may want to ask for their home address, their favourite colour and if they like jam, but as long as you have the above info this will be fine. You also need to make sure the venue has suitable DJing equipment available or you need to provide you own. If for example you can not get hold of vinyl equipment you need to make this clear on the poster/application form (e.g “no vinyl DJs”, or “no laptop DJs” if you cannot source the right equipment). Don’t let DJs bring their own equipment as it is a nightmare changing over turntables and mixers at the end of each set. Even if you could change the equipment over like an F1 pit crew, you don’t want the responsibility of someone’s dodgy kettle lead frying the venue’s fusebox.
Have the following tickboxes too:
- I am over 18.
- I do not receive regular paid DJ work.
This kind of covers you so that you are not attracting minors into a drinking establishment and the second tick box keeps the competition fair by only having amateurs apply. This is important because I remember one DJ competition I entered where I played my socks off only to have a pro DJ enter the competition who blew everyone out of the water. I’d love to name names but it was a well known UK Garage producer of the time. I didn’t feel it was that fair. So if your competition is for up and coming bedroom DJs then make it clear.
Structure
You need to be able to structure your competition into a series of heats, semi finals and a grand final. Work out how many entrants you have and from there you can work out how many weeks you can run the competition for.
Let’s say you have 30 DJs apply and you have the venue for one night per week. You can run 4 weeks of heats with 7 DJs per night. The top 3 DJs from each heat go through to the semi finals. This gives you 12 semi finalists so you can have 2 weeks of semi finals with 6 DJs per night and the top 2 from each semi making the final. You then have a final showcase of 4 DJs and the whole competition runs for 7 weeks.
You may have noticed that showcasing 7 DJs over 4 weeks comes to 28 entries and not 30. This is to give you a couple in reserve so that if any of the DJs don’t show or are late and miss their spot then you can contact a reserve DJ to fill their place. Placements should go on a first come first served basis so whoever were the last DJs to hand in an application form should go on the reserve list which is why you should ask for ‘todays date’ on the application form.
Of course, you may have more than 30 DJs apply, you may have less. You may only have the venue for 5 weeks and not 7. You’ll just have to use a bit of common sense to work out a structure for your competition to run but remember you don’t have to give every applicant a spot and you don’t have to try and fit them all in.
The last thing you want is for any of the DJs to turn up late. So what you do is you make sure they turn up half an hour before the start of the night. If the first DJ is to go on at 7.30 then the DJs need to be there by 7pm. As each DJ arrives you get them to choose what order they go on at random. What I found works best is to get some straws from behind the bar and cut them in half. Half poked into each straw is a rolled up piece of paper with a number on it corresponding to the order that the DJ goes on. They simply pull out a straw and go on in that order. Make sure you make a note of the names and order the DJs are going in so you can fill this out on the judges scoresheets before the start of the night.
I had a rule that any DJ arriving later than 7.45 is instantly disqualified no matter what the reason. If you have never run a DJ competition before you will not know the headache involved from DJs turning up late and trying to track them down. Not only is it unfair on the other DJs who have made the effort to turn up on time but it is also unprofessional. Until you are a worldwide superstar, people will not wait for you no matter how big your ego is… and even then, those who are superstar DJs never turned up late for gigs while making a name for themselves. It’s YOUR event - don’t take any shit 
Be firm, but fair.
Heats
You need to give each DJ a respectable amount of time to do their thing while still being able to fit everyone in. I found that in the heats you can give each DJ a 20 minute set and allow 10 minutes between each DJ finishing and the next one starting. With 7 DJs per night you can start the competition at 7.30pm and be finished by 11pm which should be ideal for the venue. Again, this is to be negotiated with the venue management. If you have fewer DJs you can give them longer sets or finish your nights earlier. Just use your brain and communicate with the venue manager as much as possible.
Organise the heats so that you have a mixture of genres each week. On the DJ application forms you can sort each application by genre and make sure you have a mixture of styles on each night. There are both pros and cons for having mixed styles each night as opposed to grouping let’s say all the DnB DJs together on one night, but I feel by mixing it up you keep the crowd and judges interested.
Contact each entrant and email them the info they need to attend. Let then know the start time of the event, location, prizes on offer and a brief reminder of house rules. Remind them of your email address and give them your phone number of they need to contact you on the night.
When you are deep in the mix you will know how time can fly by without you even realising it. The same applies when the contestants are mixing too. They will not know how long they have left on the clock so it is a nice courtesy to go over and let them know when they have 5 minutes left of their set so they can finish how they want to.
You’ll also want to get yourself an MC for the night. No, I mean in the traditional sense, someone who can welcome everyone at the start of the night and introduce each of the acts before they start. The MC will also need to announce winners and do all the vocal communication to let the crowd know what is going on. I simply mention this because if you are not comfortable using a microphone yourself, find someone who is.
Judges
What competition is complete without a panel of judges? You need to be able to secure yourself at least three judges to mark the contestants and decide on winners. You may even think about being a judge yourself.
It goes without saying that you can not pick just anybody to be a judge. Each judge needs to have a bit of credibility, some kind of experience and they need to know what to look for to keep the judging impartial and fair.
When I ran my competition, I was a judge myself as I was a resident bar DJ at the time. I asked a couple of my friends to join me too, one was a veteran mobile DJ with many years of experience in every dance genre imaginable and another judge ran his own events in London. These were all people who knew their stuff. Not everyone was available on every night so I mixed up the judges each week and had some on rotation, but each week there were at least three judges all with industry experience of some sort. If you know any big name DJs you can bring along to judge the finals even better!
Make sure the judges have the best seats in the house so they can fully see the DJ and hear everything they are doing clearly. Don’t stick them where there isn’t a speaker or behind a pillar or something daft.
Something else that is very important to remember is that you can not under any circumstances have DJs enter the competition if they are friends of the judges. It makes things awkward if one of the DJs goes up to shake the hand of one of the judges just after he’s finished his set. Use a bit of common sense and if someone wants to enter who is a friend of yours, then make sure you aren’t one of the judges on the night they are playing.
It is entirely up to you what criteria the judges should be marking. I think I went for the following to be marked out of 5:
- Mixing ability
- Tune selection
- Showmanship and style
- Technical skill
- Crowd reaction
…and a few others. Crowd reaction is important to have in there but it is so difficult to judge. The reason you have crowd reaction in there as an attribute to be judged is so that each DJ will bring a crowd of their friends along to spend money behind the bar. This is essentially why you are being allowed the venue in the first place so it is important that each of the DJs know to bring their friends along to cheer for them. However it is difficult to judge crowd reaction because inevitably some DJs will bring more friends than other and some may not bring anyone along at all. You can’t mark someone down just because they didn’t bring many friends along so you have to try and be as fair as possible here.
I got a load of judging forms made up too to make everything a bit easier which had a space to write the DJ name along with a pre-written list of each of the attributes to be judged.
When the last DJ has finished you need to allow 15 minutes to half an hour for the judges to add up their scores in secret and work out who the winners are. Sometimes scores are tied and the judges will need to debate who to put through to the next round so they need a quiet corner of the venue to do this.
Press and Publicity
To help get more DJs applying to your DJ competition, you should be getting in touch with local newspapers, local radio and also music magazines to tell them about what you are planning to do. Ideally you already have some prizes on board so you can use this to help sell the night to DJs who are thinking of applying. Local radio and local newspapers will love stuff like this because often they want desperately to look ‘down with the kids’ so getting a mention or even a feature should be really easy.
Once you know who is in the finals and everything is rocking, you should get in touch with local newspapers and music magazines to tell them the date of when your grand final is. Chances are they will send one of their reporters down to write up the event and take a couple of photos too. This looks great for you and also is a nice bit of exposure for the venue too as a thank you for letting you use their premises.
Common Sense
To be honest, a lot of this is all just common sense and forward planning but I certainly learned a lot from doing something like this and I just wanted to share the experience with you. DJ competitions have had, in my eyes at least, a bit of a bad time lately. Let me briefly explain; I’ll receive offers of DJ competitions into my inbox which will involve me putting together a 30 minute mix and submitting it to be judged online. Fine, but more often than not the competition turns into a publicity contest where whoever has the most plays or likes gets the prize, regardless of talent. Surely that’s what a competition is all about, the talent, the tune selection, the mixing ability, the style, the flair? I don’t beleive there are enough live DJ competition events happening here and now, there’s not enough real talent being showcased out there, especially when its possible to throw together a mix on a computer in a few mouse clicks. I hope to see the live DJ competition kept going for a while longer as it truly is the only real way to showcase up and coming talent in a real environment, using real equipment and playing to real people.
Oct062011
I’m off to Croatia this Saturday night to go and play at the Kameleon Day & Night Club in Split. This is a newly opened venue has asked me to come and play my specific brand of funky house and I’m really looking forward to it. Doors open around 10pm, local DJ Duda Dudes will be warming up and I’ll be stepping up at 1am. Expect funky basslines, hands in the air anthems, a couple of club classics and even a few cheeky bootlegs. If you are in the area and can make it then make sure you come up and say hello 
See you up the front!
Jul152011
Here’s a little article I put together on best practises for DJs to use Twitter in order to increase your fanbase and stay in touch with your followers. A lot of it is just common sense but have a read anyway as it might help you when writing your tweets in the future. Have a read and let me know what you think!
Jun292011
I’ve been wanting to write about the current state of music for a while now. It’s not really a discussion about how music is getting worse because there are still plenty of quality producers out there pushing the scene forwards but I just wanted to take a look at how the industry is shifting in its current state today compared to when I first started out and how kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it.
Nostalgia
I’m 30 years old so when I started DJing, the common way to hear new music was to head on down to the local record store, have a chat and a catch up with the guy behind the counter (hat tip to Vinyl Frontier in Woking), get given 20 or so vinyls and settle down at one of the listening posts to go through each record in detail.
After a fair amount of time I’d make my selection and typically pay between £7 - £9 per vinyl. Imports and special orders would cost more as would ‘DJ only’ promos and test presses.
I’d take my music home with me and practise a DJ set with my new vinyl. That static you got as you pulled it out the crisp new paper sleeve and that indescribable ‘new vinyl’ smell would send shivers down my spine. It was exciting times.
Now we look at the state of the music scene today and I think my biggest gripe lies with the select few that illegally download music. In the age of MP3s and instant online musical gratification I understand that you simply must have a specific tune right now and that making a trip to a store to buy music seems almost absurd now, but there is absolutely no excuse to illegally download music.
Illegal Downloads
Illegal downloads have been covered by the news more and more frequently over the past few years and I really don’t understand why people feel the need to share/steal music online. Music today can cost as little as 29p on Amazon, a far cry from the £7 I used to shell out back in the day. Who doesn’t have 29p to spend on a track? What’s 29p today - the cost of a single cigarette. Even the specialist online dance music vendors rarely charge more than £1.50 for a 320Kbps MP3 single and I think this is more than a fair price when you consider CD singles used to cost around £3.99.
What’s Changed?
So what has happened to music to make people think that free music is their right, that they shouldn’t have to pay for music at all? When did it become obscene to pay more than £1.50 for a track? Even in iTunes most music cost less than £1. A POUND!
When you get people illegally downloading music rather than paying a few pence its no wonder that the top quality artists are struggling to earn a living any more.
I think that one of the problems is that music simply has no value any more. Its become too disposable. Let me try and use an analogy here. If you are going to paint a room in your house, what clothes do you put on? Is it your £2 shirt from Primark, or your £200 Armani shirt? OK, bad analogy but you see the point, because you spent so little on something it means little to you. You have little money and no time or emotion invested in an instant download as opposed to taking a trip to a record store and meticulously going through each and every tune. Today you can preview a song and skip through it in a matter of seconds.
I know this to be true because this is what I do when I listen to promos. There is literally so much music that gets delivered to my inbox on a daily basis that the only way to get through it all is to skip through each track and devote just a few seconds of my time to each one. A few seconds of verse and chorus and I make my decision there and then (to be fair I do put those ones to one side to listen back to them properly later on).
An Over Saturated Market
Music turns over at such a phenomenal rate today and there is so much software and online tools out there to enable anyone to make music that the market has become over saturated. Its only in the last year or so that mid-week chart positions became something to fight over. There are more people making music today than there ever has been - not to say that there aren’t some talented people out there but usually it’s only 5% of tunes that I listen to now which I even consider adding to my ‘listen to later’ pile. It’s now so easy to make a tune and put it out there that there’s simply just too much of it.
In the same way that XFactor started the ball rolling with talent contest-style stars in 2004. XFactor does what is says on the tin, it finds unsung (pun intended) talented people and gives them a platform to progress their career. Fine. I get that. But the effect its had is to push valuable airtime away from people with bags of talent and give it to those that have none. Now all these other talent search TV programmes have copied the format and instead of TV time being given to people that deserve it and worked hard it is now being dished out to people that have stood in a queue. As much as I hate N-Dubz, they feel the same way and they do have a point with respect to effort-to-success ratio.
No Value Placed On Music
The generation of music buyers today will never be able to fathom the idea of treasuring music because there is an overwhelming abundance of it. Vinyl is a physical entity and as such it is prone to wear and tear. No matter how careful you are, music pressed on vinyl can only be played a finite number of times before the vinyl wears out and either starts skipping or sounds dull rendering the record ultimately useless. With MP3s there is no degradation of music and no limits placed on it, it will never wear away or sound dull and in 100 years time it will still sound the same. When you have an abundance of anything you treat it with less respect and value than you would something that is rare or something that you treasure.
The rarest of music I encountered when I started DJing was the limited edition test presses, acetates and dub plates. These were either one-off vinyl presses or super-small batches of records and because at the time you could not copy vinyl easily this made the music rare. So when you dropped that exclusive mix which blew the dance floor apart you’d get people coming up to the DJ booth asking where you got it from and what the name was. There was a certain bit of DJ snobbery I enjoyed where I took a guilty pleasure in holding up a white label and saying “Test press import, mate” to the punter.
It’s A Crowded Industry
But that’s the thing, test-press imports don’t exist any more. Producers around the world can upload their latest tracks to Soundcloud for example and share their latest creations literally minutes after it’s finished. Why? It’s because nowadays the competition out there is so much stronger than it was before and to get noticed and heard above the noise you have to put your music out there in this way to get people excited and interested in your music and to get it circulated among DJs.
Producers even give away free downloads to some of their tracks just to get people listening to their productions. It’s mad, but they have to do this in order to penetrate the market. It’s like one huge viscous circle because the more music that is given away free, the more the public demands, if not expects, from artists in general thereby feeding the fuel that diminishes the value of the music being produced.
Moving With the Times
In no way am I attacking the industry as it is at the moment because let’s face it the industry is always changing and we all have to move with the times, I just believe that the golden age of listening to music, buying music and music production has now sadly passed. Music production used to cost thousands of pounds just for the equipment alone and when something costs this amount of money you have to be really serious about doing it and have a real passion before you make that kind of investment. Now you can get programs like Reason and Ableton for a fraction of the cost.
It will be interesting to see how producers get noticed in future and how they expect to generate revenue required to carry on making music as a living. Looking to the commercial side, Professor Green for one believes that the future is in brand tie-ins, and you’d be hard pressed to miss Tinie Tempah jumping around in a Lucozade ad. Even Jennifer Lopez is selling out to Gillette. I guess you can’t blame them for when their revenue dries up from music sales, where else are they going to turn to in order to make their money? What was once a relatively stable industry has been taken over by an uncertain future.
Dance music has been a huge part of my life and it still is however the golden age of music has been and gone and now its time for the next generation to take what we have given them and to hopefully push it forwards in the right direction. Whatever happens to the state of music in the future I’m glad to have been a part of what it was in its glory days.
Jun202011
Lately I’ve seen more and more events and promoters running online DJ mix competitions. It seems like I come across new competition being launched each week so I thought it might be useful to throw together a few tips I have learned on putting forward a DJ mix submission.
Read The Rules
Study the rules carefully. Rules vary from competition to competition and its important that you meet all of the criteria asked for otherwise your mix might not qualify and all your hard work will be for nothing. Even if there are pages and pages of small print its worth spending a bit of time reading these too just to make sure you aren’t agreeing to anything you won’t want to do further down the line. Also find out what’s included in the prize - for example if the prize is a gig does it include transport to and from the venue, does it include accommodation and meals, are you sure you are available on that date, if the gig is abroad then do you have a passport etc.? Be aware of what it is you are entering in to and make sure all your bases are covered.
Do Your Research To Stand Out
Look into the promoters who are running the competition and see if you can tailor your set towards the kind of music you think they are looking for. If the competition is being run by a record label you might want to make your set comprise of just music from that label to help make you stand out. If the promoter is a festival event, perhaps your set could involve a few artists from the line-up. Try to make your set appeal to the judges and try to put yourself in their shoes - if you were a judge for this competition, what would you like to see/hear?
Don’t Compromise Your Style - Be Yourself
When I say you should tailor your set as mentioned above, I mean be flexible within your genre. Don’t start playing Trance if you are a House DJ, or play Garage if it’s not your thing. Lean towards a style that appeals but don’t break your integrity and start playing tunes you wouldn’t usually play. As an example, if I was entering a Hed Kandi competition I would play more upbeat slightly more commercial tunes. If it was a Defected competition I would probably root around in my DJ bag for some deeper-than-usual house. Structure your set exactly as you would if you were playing out live.
Listen Back To Your Mix In Full
Once the mix is finished then listen back to it in full - don’t just skip to the parts where you are mixing or applying effects, listen to the whole mix from start to finish to make sure the set flows properly and you aren’t radically changing BPM, levels or style. I personally feel that its perfectly OK to have one or two very minor flaws in the mix too as it shows you are human and that the mix is real. It all depends on personal taste but for me a mix that sounds too clinically perfect can do just as much harm than good.
Make Something Happen In The First 10 Seconds
If you are entering a popular DJ competition you have to understand that you are being judged by real human beings. It is very rare that judges will be intensively listening to every beat and every second of every mix that gets submitted as often they will have a lot to get through. So make sure something happens within the first 10 seconds of your mix to grab their attention from the start. For example don’t begin your mix with a track that has too much beat-only intro and instead begin with a track that has a more melodic opening. If you simply have to start with a specific track that has a lot of beat intro, consider starting your set from that track 30 seconds or so in so that there is some interest early on in the mix.
Title The Mix Well
There are any number of ways in which you can submit your mix online these days. Perhaps you have to email it, perhaps you have up upload it to Soundcloud, Mixcloud or otherwise. Either way, no matter how you submit your mix make sure you give it an appropriate title. Usually this will be the name of the competition and your name. For example “RANDOM EVENT FESTIVAL COMPETITION - DJ PAUL VELOCITY MIX”. Have a read of the competition rules to make sure the judges aren’t asking you to give your submission a specific name as I have seen this kind of thing requested in the past.
Add An Appropriate Image
When you upload a mix to Podomatic, Mixcloud, or Soundcloud you are given an option of uploading a picture to accompany your mix. Don’t upload a random image of a keyboard-playing cat. If possible, use the logo of the competition promoter - they will like that as it shows you are paying attention and publicising their brand too. If you have an amazing photo of you playing live then using that is a good alternative but make sure it still looks good when reduced to a thumbnail size.
Provide A Full Track Listing - Title, Artist, Mix and Label
You need to show that you know your shit when it comes to putting together a mix entry. You can help show this by putting a track listing together in the comments when you upload your mix, or write it in the email of your submission if you are sending it that way. Make sure you have the correct spelling of the title, the artist and mix of the track you are playing and number each track in order as well. If possible add the record label that the track is on too. This will help the judges see at a glance the kind of style of mix you have put together. Not putting together a track listing makes you appear lazy.
Keep It Unique
Chances are you already have a load of demo mixes stored on your computer somewhere. Resist the urge to pull out just any old mix and submit it. You should usually create a fresh mix for each competition you enter so that you can tailor each element of the mix such as the style, length or specific requirements as dictated by the rules. When adding a mix to Soundcloud the mix gets timestamped and shows how long ago it was uploaded. If the competition entry date was 3 days ago and your mix was uploaded 6 months ago it just shows that you are lazy and don’t care. Winners don’t use short-cuts.
Find Out Why You Won/Didn’t Win
If you have followed all these tips and you reach the unlikely conclusion that you did not win the competition, it’s always worth firing off a quick email to find out why. You’ve gone through all the effort and trouble of putting a mix together, you might as well get some feedback on it. Perhaps you weren’t quite the style they were looking for, perhaps they have some tips and pointers for you where you can improve. you never know, maybe the winning DJ is unavailable and you now find yourself in the right place at the right time. Its always worth an email. Just as important is to find out why you did win. Knowing exactly what you did to impress the judges will help to build a stronger relationship with the promoting brand and could lead to further work.
I hope this tips can help you out when you are considering putting together your next competition mix. Some of the tips might seem obvious but it’s definitely worthwhile checking all the angles before you submit your mix because just like a CV for an interview you only get one shot to make a good first impression. Good luck!!
Feb222011
Its been a while since I’ve had a good old rant but something has got to me lately that has really pissed me off. In fact it was over a year ago I decided to write 5 Alarm Bell Phrases Every DJ Should Avoid and it’s one of the points I wrote about back then that I want to expand on today. I’m not going to name names here, those responsible will know who they are, also there is more than just one type of person involved in this.
The thing that has really got me annoyed is the constant requests from promoters for me to come and DJ for them in exchange for selling tickets to their event. If you are a DJ that has been playing for at least a few years then I’m sure you will have been approached at some point in your career by a promoter of a big name club who wants to offer you a dream spot at their club. It all sounds great at first until it comes to the business of getting paid.
You get told that you will earn your money from DJing by making around £2 on each ticket that you sell and often promoters will require a minimum number of tickets to be sold. Now I don’t know about you, but when I price up a DJ gig I am representing my ability to perform and perform well. Undercutting the competition or offering to play cheaply just is not for me. If you quote a cheap price to play then you are compromising your integrity as a DJ and telling the promoter that you are not very good at what you do. Chances are you are actually a very capable DJ and you are much better than a lot of bedroom jocks out there - so your performance should be priced accordingly to reflect your talents.
I makes me so angry that clubs and promoters will pitch to vulnerable, inexperienced DJs that they can come and DJ at these big brand events as long as they sell X number of tickets for them. I’m sorry but surely that’s the job of the promoter?!?! The clue is in the name. If a promoter is struggling so much with an event that they have to rely on the DJ’s mates to come along then in my eyes it is an event to be avoided.
Not only is this kind of attitude towards DJs completely wrong, but it is saying to the DJ ‘Look, we don’t care what you play or how you play it, we don’t care how well you structure your set or seamlessly blend your tunes, we don’t even care if you or the crowd enjoy the night or not, we just want numbers through the door’. This kind of attitude is wrong as it shows that the promoter is lazy and incredibly stupid. They only care about the money in their back pocket and they really don’t give a shit about you, or your reputation but worst of all they don’t give a shit about the crowd and if they are having a good time or not.
By recruiting DJs in this way it is severely damaging club culture as we know it and turning it from an industry of fun and enjoyment where DJing used to be and should be a pleasure, into a cold corporate world of preying on desperate DJs to rape them of their talent and line the promoters pockets with gold. If you are a DJ then you should just be a DJ. You shouldn’t have to spend any time on promotion - that is what the promoters should do. If the night is not a success then it should be the lazy, clueless promoter that financially loses out and not you.
If this kind of thing continues to spread it will not always be the hard working talented DJs that get all the breaks and opportunities, instead it will be the arrogant unprofessional bedroom jocks that happen to have the most friends that get the chances in this industry. The DJing world already has it’s fair share of self-important arrogant pricks and I really don’t think it should be fuelled this way with any more.
I was approached to DJ for a big brand last week - one which also approached me a couple of years ago in fact - and the first question I asked before anything else was “Do you want me to sell tickets”? They said no, but the deal was that I would be given a concessions guest list and for every person that came through the door on my discounted list I would be paid a couple of quid. There was a bonus payment if I hit a certain number of punters through the door. I don’t know about you but that sounds suspiciously like selling tickets to me. The promoter was stupid for thinking they could fool me and they were lazy for trying to get me to do their work for them.
Hey, by all means if you are just starting out and this really is your only way to get into what is, let’s face it, a very tough industry then by all means dive in and bring all your mates down, just make sure you do it with your eyes wide open and make sure you use their name and their brand to the same extent as they use you.
Have you ever been approached by a big name brand in this way before? How did you react? Maybe you are still trying to decide about a recent offer. Are you one of these shady “promoters”? Would you like to try and defend yourself? Please add your thoughts in the comments below.
Rant over.
Nov232010
Yep, I’m back once again and I thought I’d write a quick blog post just to let you know what’s been happening since a few months ago when I decided to jack it all in.
Without getting too personal, I’ve been on a bit of a downer for the past six months or so and at one point things got so bad I just wanted to stop doing everything and just go sit in a big dark hole. The DJing wasn’t really going in the direction I wanted it to go in and I had been toying with the idea of knocking it on the head for a while. A few months ago I decided to do just that.
However, almost as soon as I announced I was leaving the scene, I was overwhelmed with people sending me in emails and comments and tweets and messages saying how much they liked my sets and how much I would be missed. I was really touched that people take time out of their day just to drop me a message no matter how long or short that message was.
A few personal things have happened to me over the last few weeks and it has made me realise that music is one of the biggest passions in my life and perhaps the reason I had been a bit low is because I had let other things get in the way of me enjoying making and mixing music. After reading each positive email that had come in and with the support of my friends I’ve decided to make a comeback to DJing and to do the one thing in life that makes me truly happy… spinning huge, piano-led, wobbly basslined, dancefloor destroyers!!!!
And with that in mind I have put together what I feel is my favourite Funky House Mix of all time. It’s a real blinder of a mix with some ‘roight proppa nawty’ edges. A real mix of classics brought bang up to date as well as some fresh-out-the-oven HOT promos. Head on over to the Funky House Mixes page to download the December 2010 mix right now!
Watch. This. Space.
Aug192010
Twitter DJ is the latest brainwave from Richie Hawtin, that allows for real time broadcasting of all tracks played during a DJ set. Developed in-house by Bryan McDade at Hawtin’s Minus label, it works as a conduit between Traktor and the online messaging utility Twitter. Minus and Native Instruments worked closely together to optimize the Traktor software for this special use.
The Twitter DJ application utilizes feeds from an updated version of Traktor’s standard broadcasting technology to send 60 second updates during Hawtin’s set of what’s currently playing to a designated Twitter account, allowing anyone following the Twitter group to obtain a unique insight into how a DJ builds the atmosphere and dynamics of a set, track by track, and in real time. The track information is freely accessible from any Twitter configured personal mobile devices (even from the dance floor) and archived online on the Twitter page. This concept is also a significant step towards helping smaller independent record companies and artists to gain further recognition and free promotion when their releases are played as digital files.
However, the real potential comes to light when considering the benefits for performing rights societies: “By providing the necessary information to track what is really being played in clubs, the Twitter DJ application would not only drag the likes of GEMA, PRS and SOCAN kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but make sure the real artists get paid instead of performance payments simply being carved up between the Madonnas and U2s of the world.
The Twitter DJ application can be downloaded from Minus via twitter-dj.com together with the installation guide and instructional video.
Jun172010
Always looking to expand my horizons and reach out to fresh new ears, my DJ sets can now be found on the wonderful Mugasha website. Mugasha makes it really easy to listen to Electronic Music podcasts and long sets from world famous DJs.
The ranks of DJs that Mugasha have on board currently are Tiesto, Markus Schulz, Andy Moor, Matt Darey, Menno de Jong, Roger Shah and I am honoured that my mixes are considered to be ranked among these great DJs.
I hope the Mugasha listeners like my sets! Check me out here for the intro:
http://aux.mugasha.com/new-show-funky-house-mix-by-paul-velocity
and here for the latest mix:
http://mugasha.com/funky-house-mix/june-2010
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Its not often I post stuff like this up on my site but I felt I just had to draw your attention to the amazing talent of the dj/producer 
