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to play devil's advocate, the work is in setting up the set (which is presumably synched to crazy lights & visuals) and in making music that hundreds/thousands of kids want to hear.

most of these dudes are corny and i'm not a fan, but they're tapping into something (and providing a service) that other musicians who might have more talent/skill/experience don't care to delve into anyway.

to play devil's advocate, the work is in setting up the set (which is presumably synched to crazy lights & visuals) and in making music that hundreds/thousands of kids want to hear.

Oh yeah, absolutely. They're not talentless, no matter what you think of their tunes, and I'm sure they've worked exrememly hard to get where they are. Just, for the actual duration of the gig they don't really do anything.

Yes they do, eg Britney makes $300.000 a night.

The economics of filling an 50.000 capacity arena with a rock band or with a DJ aren't any different, and the performers don't get widely dissimilar cuts either. There's not much of a mystery to it - you bring in the punters, you get paid.

this whole thread is like stepping into a conversation from 2006.

i'm still reeling from that hardwell set

Well Britney dances her ass off for a couple hours, but no one really gets paid solely/primarily based on how much effort they put in so it's silly anyway. Obviously anyone at the $300,000/night level of any field has SOMETHING that puts them above the enormous competition that inevitably chases $300,000/night. It's still amusing to watch people make that money for basically being second-rate cheerleaders/spin instructors while literally faking that they are having an effect on the music coming over the speakers.

i pretty much press play when i DJ. where' s my £300k?

Well it's not as if people are there to watch the amazing turntablist action (tho dudes like Umek used to do pretty amazing things on 4-deck setups), pretty much everyone is there to dance to the latest tunes by the guy + mixed in with some other recent records in the same style. I always view it as the producer travelling the world to show off his latest music to the fans, on a huge sound system with a big lightshow, to get the applause as well as the cheques. A big release party if you will.

Also, the way the biz is these days, there's much less money in record sales, so they have to tour for cash. The days where producers could stay at home counting their cash and send a couple of pretty dancers and a backing tape on the road (aka the Disco era) are over.

yeah for sure the point is to be in the atmosphere, hear/feel the booming sounds, be dazzled by the lights and feel graced by the iconic presence and lightly flopping hair, not to observe a skilled performer at work. So w/e.

watched five minutes of hardwell, going to commit suicide now

at the 5 min mark i was still listening to corny movie trailer narration and not w/e hardwell is

unless the dude is just playing portentous 'coming to a theater near you this halloween...' traxxx for thousands of ppl every night, which would be p awesome

Dave Clarke has his say on EDM in his usual restrained manner:

http://djmag.com/node/50178

if only those ignorant kids who don't remember what Frankie Knuckles did thirty years ago would just get off his lawn...

Meanwhile, Deadmau5 is annoyed with people further down the skills scale.

Ha, that's brilliant

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2DBYr_Z1hfg/TzQEMQoSCpI/AAAAAAAAC7U/adKEI54v0zY/s320/IronyMeter1.gif

djs are obsessed with how little work other djs do, neurosis is a good pr tool

Hah, I wonder what Yngwie Malmsteen thinks of Sunn O)))

Yngwie's opinion of most musicians that weren't Yngwie Malmsteen or Ritchie Blackmore was pretty low

Dave Clarke has his say on EDM in his usual restrained manner:

http://djmag.com/node/50178