Back in April, Clean Scene released a report which revealed some of the most gas-guzzling DJs in the world today. Richy Ahmed topped the list, travelling over 790,000km during 2019.
Rebekah, Steve Lawler, Louie Vega, Guti, Hernan Cattaneo, Guy Gerber, Black Coffee, DJ Tennis and Derrick Carter completed the top ten list of DJs who basically don’t care about the penguins – well, probably don’t.
The report made a number of recommendations at the time, including that promoters should drop exclusivity clauses – meaning DJs have to travel further for work, because they’re banned from working in a certain area for a time – and agencies having DJs touring at the same time to reduce the number of flights required.
The dance music world noticed this report back in April and have been working hard not to do anything about it as the world reopened. An insider who has worked for a number of these agencies got in touch recently and started talking about some of these ideas. And my goodness did he have a few things to say about it!
On the subject of DJs touring at the same time to reduce flights? His words were “In theory, that’s a great idea. In practice, it would never work. Hard truth is a lot of the DJs in the higher echelons, shall we say, are egotistical prickly w***ers. They couldn’t bear the idea of being in the same country as another DJ on the same agency, let alone the same f***ing plane”.
And on the subject of dropping exclusivity clauses? He said something somewhat libellous here about one promoter which I couldn’t print. But he also said “good f***ing luck getting some of the people in the scene to agree to that. They think because they’re paying top dollar, they can do what the f*** they like. And mostly, they’re right. But they’re messing things up lower down too – hence why you sometimes get a cocky upstart in house music thinking they’re worth the same money as David Morales.”
For an industry that was built on the back of a movement of change in the 1980s, they’re awfully reluctant to adjust anything, aren’t they?
