15/03/2025
Touring as a DJ duo these days is almost impossible for us. The inflated economy has driven up the cost of travel and logistics while the cost-of-living crisis and Covid rave break have contributed to a drop in events and attendee numbers. Two of us means double the cost and half the income, and all considered, 2025 might be our last year touring Audiojack as a duo.
It was always our dream to make and play records, never to be famous. We’ve always preferred to let our music do the talking, so when social media became a major metric by which a DJs worth was determined, it was a bit of a problem for DJs like us, the type who stick two fingers up at celebritism and just want to play loud music in dark rooms.
The rise of the social media celebrity coincided with the introduction of DJ hacks like sync, removing entry barriers like talent and perseverance. More introverted creators were soon outhustled by marketeers, whose approach to music is more like bosses running a PR and marketing firm than DJs making records. They know this has become a numbers business more than a music one, and their target is to build an audience, more than a discography.
Prior to the mass adoption of smartphones, when you made a good record, people noticed, and you got booked to DJ. Then social media went mainstream, and that organic hype was no longer a given reward, it was now on sale to the highest bidders. Your big record, which you watched grow organically, was drowned out by more media savvy DJs who posted viral memes, rated chicken shops, DJ’d up mountains, bought fans, anything for likes. Over the last decade, the impact of creating well supported records has diminished to the point where it now makes virtually no difference to gigs, it’s all about pay-to-play marketing strategies.
We’re venturing into DJs Complaining territory now though, which is not somewhere we like to be! We’ve loved making and playing music for a living for the last two decades and we’d like to carry on, but we will never be comfortable with endless self-promotion. We just make records. We’ll make a final decision on our future later this year, but for now we’d like to highlight something that represents us better, more of an antithesis to this way of things...
Promoters regularly complain about the cost of booking DJs. All those teams need to be paid. We’re easy to work with and we can chat directly. If you’d like to book us to play your event, hit us up at ‘DJs @ audiojackmusic.com’. No management teams to navigate, no endless waiting for an answer, just you and us, chatting about having a party together.
