Why You Can't Make a Living as a Producer or DJ

Recently, Audiojack—a wonderful veteran tech house duo I also love—made the following post.

Below is the Japanese translation I made of it (using DeepL, with some edits), rendered here back into English.

Musicians and Ordinary Jobs Both Face Difficulties

‘Making a living from music is a pipe dream’ is a curse routinely thrown at aspiring musicians with dreams.

Behind those words is the message, ‘Give up and do an ordinary, conservative job.’

But what happens if we look at the world today?

It is no longer unusual to find that even maintaining an ordinary job is difficult.

What Musicians Need to Avoid Going Hungry

I also work as a business strategy specialist, and I think the following three things may be necessary.

This time I would like to propose these approaches.

Have Your Own Channel

Beatport is an e-commerce portal for dance music.

Although dance music and digital downloads are its particular features, it is essentially like listing on platforms such as Rakuten or Amazon: they handle customer acquisition and system maintenance for you.

Naturally, you pay the platform for those outsourced functions, and naturally your share becomes smaller.

But many DJs worldwide really do pay to download music from Beatport, so withdrawing from it is probably unrealistic.

Instead, treat Beatport as a means of acquiring new fans, find devoted fans, and draw them into your own channel.

For example, you could:

In this way, you can monetize independently of Beatport.

Have Another Business

That said, as Audiojack says, electronic music is a niche. In a market without a large user base, even having your own channel may not work.

In that case, having another business is still the safe option.

What to do depends on each person's strengths, which you should play to. Here are some options:

These are things you could probably do as extensions of your current skills.

Have Strong Influence

There are huge numbers of DJs worldwide, some of whom are professionals, and a tiny fraction of those are completely unaffected by economic conditions or trends.

Those people go beyond dance music genres and even the category of musician: they are businesspeople, influencers, and celebrities, and they themselves are media and businesses.

You may like them or dislike them, but Armin Van Buuren, Tiesto, and David Guetta (perhaps Carl Cox too) fit this description.

This is from when Armin performed at the Dutch king's inauguration.

It apparently happened because the king is an Armin fan, but that simply means the seeds had been sown for something with enough influence to reach the Dutch king.

To reach that level, what matters is gaining high regard from people outside the dance music village, which probably means pursuing things like these:

That's the direction to aim for.

More Importantly, When Will We Be Able to Hold Events Normally Again?

Those are my proposals, but really, none of this matters: what everyone wants is to be able to hold events normally again as soon as possible.

As I write in September 2020, it feels as though Covid-19 has settled down in Japan.

Meanwhile, France has had 500,000 infections and Spain 700,000, and the UK is considering lockdown: a second wave is underway.

However, hospital patient numbers have fallen considerably. Considering that more than a thousand people were dying daily in spring, the situation cannot be called a crisis at all.

Rather, one could say we should actively hold events to keep the economy moving.

However, the following conditions all need to be met:

Until they are, it will be hard for the dance music scene to return to normal.

Some say ‘once there is a vaccine’, but many things remain unknown, including its effectiveness and consequences, so the conclusion is that good things come to those who wait.

I would like to keep offering support occasionally through Super Chat and similar means.