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DJing has become an everyday gesture. With a basic controller, a few hours of tutorials, and a playlist, anyone can now call themselves a DJ. That’s a good thing: mixing is a way of sharing a part of yourself, of showcasing your influences, of creating a moment of togetherness. It’s a hobby like any other, culturally rich and now almost universally accessible. Everyone should be encouraged to try it, to confront the art of telling a story through music. But that doesn’t mean everyone should be paid for it.
And this is where the tension lies: the line between amateur and professional has blurred. Being a professional DJ is not just lining up tracks with the sync button. It’s reading the faces, the closing eyes and the arms in the air, it’s understanding the energy of a crowd, holding a dancefloor, building a sonic identity over time. It also means taking responsibility for a night, knowing how to improvise when things go wrong, and maintaining a standard of sound and experience. Yet the technologization of DJing has flattened the differences. Modern decks make everything easier, from beatmatching to effects, so that the act of mixing no longer feels exceptional. Anyone can do it, and in some ways that’s great, but this democratization has saturated the market.
The result is structural devaluation. When influencers, models, actors, or singers (in short, anyone from the star system) suddenly decide to “become DJs,” they’re booked not for their music but for their follower count. The set becomes an extension of their brand image, a marketing operation. Promoters know it: booking an influencer guarantees a crowd and free promotion. But what about the music? It becomes invisible, secondary. Meanwhile, resident DJs, the ones holding local scenes together, are offered insulting fees. How many times have we heard an organizer justify: “I can’t pay you more than €250, I already spent €10,000 on the headliner”? A surreal conversation, emblematic of a system where money is concentrated in a handful of names, to the detriment of the diversity the scene depends on.
Do you think headliners care about the local scene, or about the residents they share a bill with? Of course not. If they did, their fee structure would reflect it, including a margin to raise the pay of those they play alongside. A kind of sharing, a way to give back to the community. But that logic doesn’t exist.
And then there’s the audience’s skewed perception, the true engine of the scene, but one that often drifts. After being steeped in pre-recorded, formulaic, often mediocre sets, listeners lower their standards. They get used to music that is repetitive, predictable, devoid of real storytelling. In many party contexts, heavy substance use only reinforces this pattern: some DJs owe their success less to the quality of their mixing than to the altered state of a chemically euphoric and forgiving crowd. When mediocrity becomes the norm, excellence goes unnoticed.
This dynamic creates an unequal and impoverished scene. Everyone can, and should, DJ for the joy of it. But entry into professionalization needs to be tied back to real standards. Acknowledging amateurs for what they contribute, yes. But restoring value to professionals, those who build, innovate, and sustain nightlife day after day, is essential. The ones who give back to the scene, who take risks, who don’t simply cash in on their name recognition.
The future of club culture cannot rest on a star system inflated by follower counts, one that crushes local talent and homogenizes dancefloors. The point is not to close off DJing. On the contrary: the more people are passionate, the more the culture grows. But we must admit that not everyone should be paid for it. Because to professionalize without discernment is to kill the very scene we claim to celebrate.