“I Felt Like a Normal Human Being”: Professional DJs’ Experiences of the COVID-19 Lockdowns

ABSTRACT

The social restrictions prompted by COVID-19 disproportionately impacted creative industries that rely upon live performance as a main source of revenue, including the (electronic) music industry, resulting in widely reported financial hardship experienced by musicians. Based on original interview data, this article offers more nuanced insight into the experiences of professionally well-established EDM DJs. Our data show that while the DJs experienced anxiety and hardships matching those reported elsewhere, many also noted a less reported, more positive, dimension: In forcing a break from work, lockdowns created space to reflect upon the harmful effects of creative working practices and to envisage more fulfilling work-life balances.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative labor
• creative industries
• music industries
• COVID-19
• DJs
• EDM

The DJ—an individual who plays recorded music to audiences at public events—is a central figure in contemporary popular-music culture. Although discotheques first emerged in the 1940s, DJs generally started to become important cultural figures during the disco boom in the 1970s, which subsequently fed into other musical scenes like house and techno, now often aggregated under the umbrella term “electronic dance music” (EDM). EDM has become one of the most significant “genres” in twenty-first-century popular music. DJs have thus gone from “keen hobbyists” (Brewster and Broughton 533) to central figures in live performances, music production, and dissemination, with more prominence in the industry than ever before (Karpetz 5). Despite this evolution, a DJ’s job remains much the same: to make people dance. The DJ and the crowd exist in a symbiotic relationship, with the energy, movement, and reaction of the crowd affecting the DJ’s song selection, mixing style, and tempo change (Pfadenhauer), creating a continuous “feedback loop” (Attias 28–29; Biehl) between the DJ and the crowd.

As figures whose purpose depends upon public gatherings, DJs felt significant impact upon their working practices from lockdowns and other social restrictions prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with other creative sectors that relied on live performance, there were widespread stories of existential threats to DJs’ industry and of creative workers abandoning precarious creative careers in search of more secure employment.

Using in-depth qualitative data, this article investigates successful EDM DJs’ experiences of these lockdowns and restrictions. The study begins by framing DJs’ work within existing literature on creative labor before discussing how the pandemic impacted the (electronic) music industry and exacerbated many of the problematic elements of creative careers. We then move on to discuss how the data were collected and outline the interview data. We have found that although the challenges caused by the pandemic undoubtedly caused stress and anxiety, the lockdowns also created a space for some DJs to reevaluate their problematic working practices. Thus the pandemic may not have been as wholly negative as many of the overarching narratives suggest, although this “positive” is itself a reflection of the structural challenges that beset creative workers.

DJs as Creative Workers

The rise of DJs, and of EDM more generally, has coincided with the decline of manufacturing sectors and the subsequent rise of service, information, and creative sectors in the global North. Indeed, the use of vacated industrial warehouses for house parties and raves is a potent symbol of the ways in which culture has come to be used as a tool of urban regeneration. The “creative industries” have come to be treated as something of a panacea for various kinds of social decline, promoted rigorously by politicians and policy makers, becoming an increasingly important part of Western economies. In the UK, for example, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that “the creative industries” and “the cultural sector” accounted for 7.7% of the country’s Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2019 (DCMS).

Both the rhetoric and the reality of the creative industries’ celebrants have been critiqued, however. For the current article, of greatest relevance is the critical literature on the experience of those working in the creative industries (for example, Banks, Politics; Banks and Hesmondhalgh; Hesmondhalgh and Baker; McRobbie, “Re-Thinking”; Ross). Creative labor is often imagined to be particularly sincere and satisfying, offering workers rewards and freedoms seemingly unattainable in other industries. The promise of autonomy and creative fulfillment is celebrated as an ideal for employment and has led to a proliferation of talented hopefuls searching for “new employment spaces where pleasure, autonomy and income seemingly coexist” (Duffy 442). However, such images usually gloss over the realities and risks of working in creative industries, with workers in creative industries being highly individualized (Adkins; Gill; McGuigan). Unlike workers in sectors underpinned with established contracts and institutional support, the freelance nature of creative labor denies workers any such security. In the creative industries, “there is no space… for trade unions, for collectivity and solidarity, … for rights and entitlements, for workplace democracy, for maternity leave or paternity leave or sickness benefits” (McRobbie, “Re-Thinking” 33). When workers are free from the restrictions of conventional workplaces, they are also “free” of the benefits. Individualized workers are personally responsible for the consequences of their actions, leaving them culpable for any failures—intended or not (O’Connor). Workers must bear the costs of these failures themselves, a price that Hesmondhalgh and Baker recognize can be considerable (57). Creative workers must thus become “their own micro-structure… do[ing] the work of the structures by themselves” (McRobbie, “Clubs to Companies” 518), actively managing themselves through disciplinary practices in order to solve systemic problems with individualized solutions (Banks, Politics 1).

These processes of individualization structure the working conditions in the creative industries. The reward of autonomy is twinned with the risk of precarity (Banks, Politics 43). In order to gain a foothold in their industry, creative workers endure high levels of job insecurity with low or no pay and no guarantee of ongoing employment. A highly entrepreneurial mind-set, alongside relentless informal networking, is thus required in order to seize opportunities in rapidly changing fields (Gill and Pratt). Creative workers tend to work long hours, often taking multiple jobs, including “noncreative” ones, to supplement and support their creative careers. Thus, while creative laborers may appear liberated, with multiple opportunities, they also are threatened by risk and governed by their own subjection (Adkins; Banks, Gill, and Taylor; Gill).

Such characterizations certainly hold true for those working in the music industry (Gee and Yeow; Haynes and Marshall; Thomson), including DJs. Borrowing from Gill and Pratt’s characterization of precariousness in cultural work, we can see how DJs’ working practices reflect many of the characteristics of creative labor more generally. Reflecting the “temporary, intermittent and precarious jobs” (14), each job, or “gig,” for a DJ lasts only for a few hours or so, usually taking place on the weekend. Corresponding to what Gill and Pratt describe as “bulimic patterns of working” (14), some DJs play six gigs per weekend, resulting in a lopsided and intense work cycle: working all weekend with gigs finishing in the early hours of the morning, but then with no paid work at the beginning of the week. The requirement for DJs to travel from gig to gig, both internationally and locally, reflects “high levels of mobility” (14), and, as nightclubs are notoriously places of leisure with “relaxed rules and suspended responsibilities” (Garcia 232), DJs’ work environments are unmistakably “informal” (Gill and Pratt 14). DJs are immersed in this loose setting, in their formal workplace yet being “part of the party” (Morrison 303), capturing the “collapse or erasure of the boundaries between work and play” (Gill and Pratt 14) in creative labor, which means it can be hard “to distinguish between friends and work colleagues” (Reitsamer 35).

Even before the global coronavirus pandemic, the long-term impact on the mental health of musicians of these highly pressurized working practices was becoming recognized. In 2016, a survey of 2,200 UK musicians suggested that musicians were three times more likely to suffer mental health problems than the general population, with “cripplingly high levels of self-reported depression (68.5%) and anxiety (71%) amongst music makers” (Gross, Musgrave, and Janciute 12). Key contributing factors were financial insecurity and subsequent inability to plan; working within a “feedback economy of relentless opinion and criticism”; and the blurring of work and social lives, which could cause questioning of the authenticity of personal relationships (Gross, Musgrave, and Janciute 12–19). Similar concerns have been raised within the Australian music industry (Wolfers). Within EDM, the suicide of superstar DJ Avicii in 2018 meant that “the mental health of EDM artists became a topic of more intense discussion” within EDM media and industry organizations (Ptatscheck 40).

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Music Industry and Musicians

The pandemic acted as a kind of stress test on all areas of society, exacerbating social inequalities, fragile economic circumstances, and state structures, to name a few. Without understating the effects of the pandemic on other sectors, the impact on the creative and cultural industries was severe. A UNESCO survey across a range of countries reported declines in revenue of 20 to 40 percent and falls in GVA of 30–40% in all countries, with only China bucking the trend. These falls were much more significant than in overall national economies: While GDP fell by under 10% in 2020 in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and Poland, for example, the GVA of the creative industries fell by at least 30% in each country (Naylor et al. 18–20).

Within the cultural sector more generally, music was particularly hard-hit. A report on the impact of COVID-19 on the UK creative industries, commissioned by the Creative Industries Federation, identified the music industry as one of those hit hardest, with revenue predicted to fall by 58% and employment by 60% in 2020 (Projected 34), compared to 31% and 19% for the creative industries overall (3). The explanation for the severity is the significance of live events as a revenue stream, which has been growing as a proportion of overall music revenue since the start of the century, from 33% in 2000 to 43% in 2017 (Mulligan). Obviously, these headline figures have implications for individual musicians’ income—if anything, the significance of live income is actually intensified by skewed contractual norms in the recording industry (David 127–29). David argues that “for the vast majority of musical artists the primary source of income is, will be and always has been, live performance” (129). This is true for DJs as well: Rietveld emphasizes that gigs are “the main income of DJs” (93), something that was the case for all of the DJs in Reitsamer’s study, for example (37).

Notwithstanding the significance of live performance for music-industry income, in early 2020 national governments across the globe began to impose lockdown orders to reduce the spread of COVID-19, which brought live music, alongside virtually all aspects of normal life, to a dramatic halt. Although specifics vary across nations, restrictions of varying types and severity continued for about eighteen months. These did not always entail outright bans, but, even at times when live entertainment performances were permitted, restrictions on audience sizes, the need for social distancing measures, and things like the impossibility of event planners being able to purchase cancellation insurance meant that putting on live music was economically unviable for many venues even during non-lockdown periods. Overall, the pandemic left live music facing an “existential threat” (Taylor, Raine, and Hamilton 12).

The restrictions were felt even more acutely within electronic dance music and the club scene. EDM is even more dependent upon live events for the majority of its income, with clubs and festivals accounting for 60% of overall revenues in 2019 (Boyle). However, in many countries, nightclubs were treated differently from other live-music venues. For example, in England, when indoor entertainment venues were permitted to partially reopen following the first national lockdown, “nightclubs” were number one on the list of institutions explicitly listed as having to stay closed. As if to reinforce the point, number two on the list was “dance halls, discotheques and any other venue which a) opens at night, b) has a dance floor or other space for dancing… and c) provides music… for dancing” (Health Protection). It was as if deep-rooted ideologies associating club cultures with danger and illicitness became realized in the physical risk of viral transmission—the dance floor as a site of contagion. Overall, nightclubs were the last kind of hospitality business in England permitted to reopen, a pattern repeated in many other countries. This obviously had a devastating impact on the industry. In February 2021, the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Night Time Economy reported that, as a result of the restrictions, nightclubs had made an average of 51% of their employees redundant and that 85% of remaining employees were considering leaving the industry (COVID-19 3). Two years after the national lockdown was first announced, and eleven months after all coronavirus restrictions had been lifted in England, the number of nightclubs in the UK has decreased by 20% (Rosney). Globally, the overall value of the EDM live sector fell by 78% in 2020 (Boyle).

The sudden shutdown of clubs and live-music venues, along with other cultural arenas, brought into sharp relief the structural insecurity that governs the lives of most creative workers, following as it did “a long period of declining wages, increasing precarity [and] high indebtedness” (Banks and O’Connor 4). With informal and episodic working patterns, often involving multiple kinds of employment in “portfolio careers,” creative workers exist in a volatile institutional framework, exacerbated by ideologies that interpret creative labor as play rather than work. The restrictions prompted by the pandemic made the hand-to-mouth nature of such practices unsustainable, but, in the individualized environment described in the previous section, creative workers have tended to fall through the cracks of state support, left to rely on their own resilience and ingenuity in order to make ends meet. When the seismic implications of the pandemic compelled governments to support workers in all affected industries, this liminal position was merely reinforced, as the support schemes devised were ill-suited for creative workers. For example, Flynn and Anderson’s survey of 175 musicians in Liverpool found that just 22% had received any support from the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS), with a further 6% receiving some support from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (66). The UK Musicians’ Union estimated that 45% of its members did not meet the eligibility requirements of the SEISS (“Self Employed”).

Overall, as Cannizzo and Strong highlight, “the conditions of labor in music, and the creative sector more broadly, have developed in such a way that workers were particularly susceptible to the impacts of a crisis such as Covid” (102). Surveys and studies of musicians and their careers during the pandemic painted a grim picture. A survey of 560 musicians by Encore Musicians reported that respondents had lost an average of £11,300 in the first six months of Covid restrictions (£19,900 for “pop musicians”), with half of them having no performances booked for the remainder of 2020. Sixty-four percent of respondents reported that they were considering leaving the industry (Bacon). A survey of 700 musicians reported that more than half of its respondents were earning no money from music, and “96% are worried about their financial situation with 70% not confident they will be ‘able to cope financially’ over the next six months” (“Hidden”). Beyond the UK, Cannizzo and Strong’s survey of musicians and music-industry workers in the Australian state of Victoria found 58% stating that they had considered leaving the industry (105), while Burke provided accounts of well-established Australian musicians who had transferred to alternative careers as a result of the pandemic.

Research Sample and Data Collection

The data that have emerged so far on the impact of COVID-19 on musicians and their careers have tended to treat “musicians” as a homogeneous group. This is an understandable initial response and helps provide a general overview of the impacts, but within the category of musician there may be many different kinds of experience. There will be variations across genres, as certain genres may be more dependent upon live performances than others or have more developed online conventions that make it easier to monetize online interaction. Musicians at different career stages may be affected differently. For example, more-established performers may find interruption less disruptive than someone on the cusp of “breaking through.” And, of course, musicians in different countries would have been subject to the different restrictions their national governments introduced. Thus, as well as considering “musicians,” or “creative workers” in general terms, it is also necessary to drill down and investigate the experiences of specific groups of musicians. Such work is limited at present but beginning to emerge. For example, Hytönen-Ng provides a sociological account of the experience of British jazz musicians, while Ptatscheck offers a more psychological presentation of three German EDM DJs.

Drawing on original qualitative data, this article adds to this small body of literature, by discussing the experiences of well-established EDM DJs. It draws on a subset of data arising from a project that originally had a broader remit, investigating the lockdown experiences of EDM DJs across a range of career stages. The project sample consisted of a range of professional, semiprofessional, and amateur student DJs. The sampling was purposive, intended to ensure that a range of different “levels” of DJ were accessed. Participants were recruited either through the researchers’ personal connections or via direct messaging on social media platforms. This study focuses primarily on the responses of the professional DJs, for two reasons. Firstly, the narratives of the amateur and professional DJs in the broader sample tended to diverge (for example, the amateur DJs were more concerned about maintaining an online presence to develop their careers and, as many of them were students who returned home for lockdown, had fewer financial worries caused by a lack of gigs). Secondly, it is relatively uncommon within academic research to study well-established musicians/DJs, with accounts of less popular or DIY artists tending to be more prevalent. While not necessarily global superstars, the majority of professional DJs in our sample are very well known in their genres, routinely performing internationally at major events and with recognizable “brand identity.” The sample thus provided an opportunity to investigate the experiences of a stratum of musicians not commonly accessed by academic researchers (Table 1).

Table 1. Research sample.

Name (pseudonym)	Status	Gender	Location	Profile	Instagram followers
Josh	Pro	M	Sweden	DJ and producer. Professional for ca. five years. Released critically acclaimed album and tours worldwide.	ca. 50k
David	Pro	M	UK	DJ and producer. Professional for 20+ years. Award-winning producer. Performs regularly at Europe’s most prestigious clubs.	ca. 50k
Ollie	Pro	M	UK	DJs, doesn’t produce. Professional for 20+ years. Established renowned record label and hosts influential radio show. Performs internationally.	ca. 65k
Lorenzo	Pro	M	UK	DJ and producer. Professional for ca. ten years. Regular performer at largest EDM clubs and festivals.	ca. 30k
Max	Pro	M	South Africa	DJ and producer. 20+ years experience. Cult following in specific EDM subgenre. Headlines well-established underground festivals.	ca. 30k
Emily	Pro	F	UK	DJ and producer. Ca. 15 years experience. Breakthrough single has 5M+ streams on Spotify. Mainly UK-based, with some gigs in Europe.	ca. 5k
Noah	Semipro	M	UK	Full-time job unconnected to music industry. Started to DJ in his 40s and set up events company. Performs at events headlined by major international performers.	ca. 1k
Nick	Semipro	M	UK	Range of jobs (e.g. co-running label) within the music industry; performs at bars and events in London.	ca. 1k

Reflecting on the sample composition, what is most notable is the gender imbalance. This is not hugely surprising, given that “DJ cultures have been, and continue to be, male dominated” (Gavanas and Reitsamer 51). Attempts were made to reach more female DJs in the initial purposive sampling. This resulted in greater female representation in the overall sample but stubbornly low within the “professional” stratum. Perhaps reflecting the smaller population we were drawing from, further efforts to recruit more female participants from snowball sampling were unsuccessful within the short time frame for the project. It is possible that this is itself an artifact of the pandemic, given that, generally, Covid negatively impacted women more than men (Flor et al.), and that is likely to have reinforced persistent gender inequality in the creative industries (Eikhof). The female professional DJ in our study did describe a somewhat different picture from that of the male DJs in the sample, and greater female representation would have enabled us to investigate the nuances of gender further.

The majority of the respondents were UK-based. The project itself was UK-focused, but snowball sampling created an opportunity to interview two established DJs from other countries. While obviously each country had its own specificities as to lockdown/Covid restrictions, the presence of non-UK DJs in the sample should not significantly affect our results. For one thing, Sweden and South Africa demonstrate profiles similar to that of the UK in terms of the impact of the pandemic on the creative industries (Naylor et al. 20). For another, all of the professional DJs in the sample perform internationally, and so were affected by restrictions in many countries, including those relating to international travel.

Interviews were conducted soon after all Covid restrictions in the UK had been lifted, in July 2021. The interviews were in-depth and semistructured, with open-ended questions. A broad interview schedule was used to facilitate discussion, although, in practice, participants led the discussion and would frequently jump to and from different topics. The interviewer made prompts when needed to guide the discussion and to ensure that all topics were covered. Interviews began with a brief overview of participants’ careers and what they liked most about DJing. They then moved on to focus on working practices, initial responses to the pandemic lockdowns, strategies for managing the financial challenges, and how they felt as restrictions began to be eased. The interviews ranged from 45 to 90 minutes. The lengthy interviews helped to establish a rapport with each participant. The interviews were conducted via video call, recorded, and fully transcribed before being thematically analyzed manually. Research was conducted according to the British Sociological Association’s ethical guidelines and was approved by the University of Bristol’s ethics processes.

In the remainder of the article, we present and analyze data from the interviews. Firstly we focus on initial responses to the lockdown and strategies for managing the financial challenges faced by participants. This was the initial focus of the project, but we were surprised to find that many DJs also highlighted some more positive elements of the pandemic for them; we discuss these in the final substantive section before offering a concluding discussion.

The Challenges of Lockdown

One might expect that the initial responses to lockdown from all of the professional DJs would be quite negative. However, accounts from the DJs in this sample were more ambivalent. There were certainly negative/anxious responses: Ollie described “a lot of background anxiety, obviously. … I was quite worried,” while Lorenzo expressed frustration that the lockdown would interrupt his career momentum:

I was on a roll at that point. I had, like, some really big gigs lined up, some big press lined up. And at first in 2020 I was bumming out quite a lot. I thought “this is really annoying.”

Others, however, recalled having more positive responses, sensing the opportunity for rejuvenating breaks:

We all thought it was going to be, like, three weeks of lockdown. I was, like, “Oh yeah, I[’ll] have a three-week break and sit watch[ing] Netflix.” (Emily)

Personally was kind of happy because I thought this is going to be, like, a we’re-just-gonna-get-like-a-six-month break. (Josh)

However, as venues remained closed and events continued to be canceled, that initial optimism dried out, and feelings of risk, instability, and worry began to settle in:

I was “Oh, well, maybe there won’t be… a summer of parties…, [but] towards the winter, it’s going to be fine.” And when that didn’t happen, [and] bills started to pile up, and my revenue started sinking, so it was… that obviously made me a little-bit worried. I was, like, you know, “how long is this gonna go on?” (Josh)

I think by the time we kind of came out of the first lockdown, and then we had a very brief period of events being allowed again with tiny capacity… which most promoters won’t even bother [with]. And then, I think, it was when the second lockdown came, that’s when it just started to hit me that this cycle could go on and on and on and on. (Max)

The pandemic has been referred to as a catalyst for “long-instituted feelings of precariousness” (Banks, “Work” 650). Overall, after some initial optimism, this was consistent with responses by our participants. For example, Noah believed that the lockdown “highlighted just how precarious any creative career is,” while Josh recalled how lockdown made him think that DJing is “quite replaceable,” with the potential to just “go away tomorrow.” Other participants recalled how lockdown ignited fears of the “fickle” (Ollie), “unstable” (Emily), and even “scary” (Nick) nature of the music industry.

Unsurprisingly, given the significance of live performances to musicians’ incomes, the main cause of anxiety was the closure of all venues and cancellation of booked events:

So, after a month it was, like, “fuck, this is actually serious now.” We were booked for events, and these events just kept cancelling and cancelling and cancelling. I can remember being sat on my laptop one day, and just being in floods of tears because my entire summer got cancelled. … I was, like, “Oh my God, I’ve literally just lost, like, fifteen grand in the space of ten minutes.” I was, like, “how am I going to make money?” (Emily)

As outlined in the earlier section, in the UK at least, the state support measures designed by the government to offset the loss of income were ill-suited to creative workers, with most musicians ineligible for support. Participants in our project shared feelings of discouragement, helplessness, and dismay with regard to the financial support they received. Those in the present study who received anything from the scheme described it as “a tiny drop in the ocean” (Emily) compared to their usual incomes. For Lorenzo, the limited support highlighted to him how “the financial system is not built to accommodate DJs.”¹

Because of the drying up of their major income stream and the lack of government support, the DJs in this sample, like many other creative workers, had to find alternative ways to support themselves. These can be grouped in two broad categories: budgeting (reducing spending to bare essentials, relying on savings and family loans) and developing or expanding alternative income streams.

Given that the DJs in this sample were well-established performers with long careers, many were in the relatively privileged position of having some savings to fall back on. With prudent budgeting, this provided a limited safety net:

I’ve been working nonstop for, like, ten years. And I’m quite sensible—like, I save. (David)

I was lucky I had quite a lot of savings. And so I kind of just dug into it really and just treated it as my income. (Lorenzo)

I was also quite fortunate in that, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I have savings. … I thought that lockdown would last a year or something at the beginning. I thought maybe I wouldn’t work for a year. And I thought to myself, “I can afford that. It will be fine.” (Ollie)

While such quotes may make it seem that lockdown was less impactful upon these DJs because they were already successful, this would be misleading. Many of them had greater financial commitments associated with growing older (families, houses, etc.), and the majority of the respondents mentioned straitened financial circumstances:

Our entire expenditure and living was stripped down so much. (David)

I just saw, like, chunks of whatever savings I had being siphoned away. (Josh)

Financially, it was a big threat. I definitely went broke, had to borrow bits of money at a time just to cover overheads for the house, but luckily my parents were just, sort of, okay to do that for me, so I’ve just got a tally going with them. But it was a really shit thing to have to ask when your parents are retired, and to use their savings, and it’s not something that I took lightly. And it’s very humbling and obviously scary. (Max)

Ultimately, although many of these DJs had some resources to fall back on, such resources were finite, and depleting them gave the DJs less resilience with which to manage the vagaries of creative working in the future. Their experiences as creative workers, though, likely helped them, given how such workers generally need to build a career maximizing very scarce resources. As David noted, “because I remember just being utterly skint for, like, three years, I’ve always really [been cautious with] money.” Max’s interview perhaps encapsulated this more than did the interview of any other participant. Max having worked as a DJ for more than thirty years, his narrative was littered with notions of the self-discipline and self-monitoring—in his words, the requirement to “forecast what may go wrong”—required to get by on very little.

Given the finite nature of personal savings, the DJs in this study had to seek out other sources of income in order to survive the lockdown. Many EDM DJs also involve themselves in the related creative activities of music production, either making original compositions or remixing existing songs. Under normal circumstances these are not economically profitable for most DJs, instead acting as promotion for live events (Reitsamer 37), but they took on more importance during the pandemic. However, some, like Emily, found collaborative working in lockdown very challenging “because I couldn’t go to the studio. So we were trying to do online sessions, which is just a nightmare.” She also pointed out that “it was also really hard to make music when you’re kind of not feeling happy, or you’re tired, or you’re just locked in the house.” An alternative for some of the DJs was to produce remixes of music by other artists, although these were viewed as low-status or artistically unrewarding:

At some point I was just talking to my managers, like, just “I need to do some remixes.” Remixes are, like, at a certain point they’re good money and they’re kind of easy to do. … I just started doing things that maybe I wouldn’t have done otherwise, shit I wasn’t proud of. Nothing, like, nothing really bad or anything, but there was, there were a few, like, humbling moments, where, you know, I’ve built up sort of a war chest of [cultural] capital and… it was sort of scraping the bottom [of the barrel] a little bit. Luckily I haven’t done [it] many times, but when I did it was just, this is, “this is not great.” (Josh)

Josh’s perception was that “most DJs that I know have probably done some stuff that they would prefer not to, just to sort of get by during the pandemic.” This was a view reinforced by Felix, one of the student DJs in the project:

A lot of [established DJs] did things for their income or keeping their name relevant. … One artist… he’s quite famous, put thirty tracks out at the start of lockdown for, like, one pound each. And I just thought he didn’t need to do that, it made no sense. He didn’t want to release these things, he was just desperate. The scene got very desperate. So many artists were just releasing, releasing, releasing loads of stuff that they wouldn’t have released otherwise. Some started using Patreon, which is sort of a tutoring site, to make money from tutoring, which you wouldn’t expect from these people who play at Berghain.²

Felix’s view perhaps betrays his position as someone who does not yet rely on DJing for his income, but both his and Josh’s accounts reflect the inherent contradiction that DJs, in common with other creative workers, face between artistic expression and the need to make a living (Gee and Yeow 346)—something that was exacerbated during the pandemic.

One of the ways in which the music industry more broadly sought to offset the cessation of physical live performances was in the adoption of livestreaming events online. This was a strategy that the majority of the DJs in the sample tried. Rituals of commuting to a club and setting up gear were quickly replaced by moving “plants into the front room and livestreaming to the Internet” (David). However, David’s analysis was that there was “no money to be made,” and no one in our sample was able to use livestreaming to even minimally offset the loss of income due to lockdown. Furthermore, some, like Josh, felt that livestreams threatened to devalue DJing, reducing DJs to “a shadow of what we once were. … DJs have become much more of a digitalizable product. … It makes us replaceable.” Emily, meanwhile, highlighted how fans failed to recognize the amount of work that went into livestreaming:

Probably weekly I would have another request for another livestream. I think people just thought, “oh yeah, that’d be fun.” But it’s exactly the same as doing a gig for free. You still have to do exactly the same preparation as you would do for a normal gig.

These findings mirror responses from other studies in which musicians believed the streamed events took at least as much work and energy as physical events yet provided “no financial reward” (Howard et al. 426). They also reflect a persistent issue in how creative work is routinely thought of by consumers as akin to a hobby, implying that its production should be free to consume.

In addition to livestreaming offering minimal financial gain, many of the respondents voiced a dislike of livestreams because of an absence of any crowd connection. As mentioned in the introduction, the “feedback loop” and crowd connectedness are essential features of DJing and one of its inherent rewards. The interviews confirmed this, with “the buzz of having a good crowd and the conversation between both me and them” (Lorenzo) described as “the best bit” by Emily and “the most addictive part” of DJing by Ollie. These intrinsic rewards were not accessible via livestreaming, with Emily commenting that the crowd connection is something “you don’t get on a computer screen” and Max affirming “you can’t [get audience feedback]. I mean, people might give you a comment, but we’re not wired the same way.” Livestreams were unsuccessful in maintaining the essential aura of club culture, as performers had to second-guess an invisible, inaudible crowd. Max concluded that livestreams “became a little bit depressing,” and they were described by Ollie as “a bit of a sad process really.” He went on to say that he “can’t see why any DJ would want them to be their future.”

In light of the uncertain and fragile circumstances in which they found themselves, and the absence of some of the intrinsic rewards of DJing, it is perhaps unsurprising that four of the six professional DJs mentioned that they started to “think about other career paths” (Ollie), asking themselves if “maybe this is the time to consider abandoning DJing” (Max) in order to “go back to doing something else a little bit more stable” (Josh). This is consistent with findings from the surveys from other research described above. However, in some cases, such thoughts resulted in further anxieties about the transferability of the skills that they had developed in their DJ careers:

It was that horrible realization… having DJ’d for almost twenty years as a full-time job, it’s, like, not employable in the world of, kind of, office work. [In normal circumstances] if you couldn’t DJ you’d be, like, “okay, I’ll go and work in a shop or work in a bar,” but you can’t do that because the shops and the bars were shut. (Emily)

A lot of fans were telling me to start coding. (Max)

The Benefits of Lockdown

The preceding section makes clear that the lockdowns necessitated by COVID-19 had significant negative repercussions for the professional DJs in our study. The closure of live venues meant the immediate removal of DJs’ main income stream, and inappropriate or inadequate state support, with limited opportunities for alternative employment, meant considerable financial anxieties for all of the professional DJs interviewed. Furthermore, there was an absence of many of the intrinsically rewarding elements of creative working, with DJs required to take on low-status or aesthetically unrewarding work to make ends meet and with no possibility for the audience interaction characteristic of live events. There was also chronic uncertainty about how long lockdown would go on and about the potential for further lockdowns.

Framed this way, it is impossible to see the periods of lockdown as anything other than a negative experience for these participants. That is certainly the story that one might expect to find, consistent with reports of financial hardship and anxiety outlined earlier. It may seem surprising, therefore, that overall responses about lockdown were more ambivalent, with many of the DJs actually emphasizing the positive impact it had upon their lives. In this section, we highlight two of the most important themes to emerge: an enhanced sense of connectedness among DJs and the opportunity to mitigate against, and reflect upon, some of the detrimental impacts of creative labor careers.

One theme discussed by all participants in the study was a strong sense of solidarity and cohesion among DJs that emerged during lockdown. It is commonly noted that the individualized nature of creative work can result in there being “no space… for collectivity and solidarity” among workers (McRobbie, “Re-Thinking” 33). Yet, despite this, respondents spoke of how their shared, distinctive experiences meant that they were able to relate to other DJs and thereby give and receive appropriate advice and support, which resulted in strong ties of cooperative solidarity and created a symbiotic “supportive ecosystem” (Noah). All participants recalled increased communication between themselves and other DJs, such as “chatting to check in on each other” (Emily) and “writing to each other a lot more, making sure that everyone is, like, okay” (Josh). Such a development is consistent with Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s analysis of one of the ironic consequences of individualization—that despite its atomizing and alienating nature, individualization is a collectively shared experience and can actually serve to bring together “communities of shared worries [and] shared anxieties” (18). Through their shared experience of precarity, participants formed a common ground with other DJs, feeling “comfort knowing that you’re not the only one going through this” (Josh), creating a stronger sense of social cohesion (Ntontis and Rocha). This concept is discussed by both Lorenzo and Josh, who recognized the atomization they were experiencing but also the positive dimensions it brought about:

There was a lot of communication between us. … I guess in that sense [lockdown] kind of blended everyone a bit more because we were in the same boat. Our world is quite unique, you know, freelancers in this small bracket of income. … We’re getting nothing from the government and [so] all kind of relate to each other. (Lorenzo)

Most of the DJs that I’ve sort of come to know, we just become closer and closer when stuff like this happens because, realistically, next time there’s another pandemic we’re the first ones to go and the last ones to open. (Josh)

Participants felt united with other DJs while confronting the same challenges, which brought the sense of them all “being in the same boat” (Abrams, Lalot, and Hogg). Four participants went so far as to say that lockdown “strengthened relationships” (David) with peers and colleagues and that they now “feel very close to the DJ community” (Nick). These findings show how a shared precarity nurtured a mutual respect and understanding between DJs, which created a heightened collectivized environment. Paradoxically, in a time of isolation and social distancing, participants felt closer to other DJs.

By far the most significant positive effect of lockdown described by our respondents was the way in which it facilitated a rethinking of their attitudes toward work and a recalibration of their work-life balance. An earlier section of this article briefly outlined some harmful elements of working in the creative industries. These included a relentless pressure to network and self-promote in order to secure future “gigs” and a dissolving of the boundaries between work and leisure. McRobbie, for example, describes how the allure of “pleasure in work” can result in intense working patterns that leave creative laborers exhausted, burnt out, depressed, and self-exploiting (“Re-Thinking” 33). This was the scenario portrayed by Ollie when asked to describe his working patterns prior to lockdown:

Pretty bad. I think that’s the other part of doing something fun, that you enjoy. It’s quite difficult to carve time out to just relax and take time for yourself. So I found it quite difficult to switch my brain off and would just be habitually, like, writing emails at sort of one o’clock in the morning.

Others painted a similar picture, with pre-lockdown work schedules described as being “very busy” (David) and “really, really full on” (Nick) with “not much downtime” (Lorenzo). The pressure to accept whatever work comes your way created intense and “bulimic” patterns of working:

I was saying yes to a lot of work, so I was away, as well, maybe like three to four nights a week at the peak of it. Maybe playing about 140 shows a year. Which really is a lot. There was a lot of insane travel. It meant that I didn’t have tons of time to just be like a real person, I guess. … I didn’t really think about it at the time, but it was really frantic. I was really busy, trying to just stay afloat, and kind of keep going through it. (Ollie)

The detrimental impact of travel was something also mentioned by Josh:

Touring is really not healthy in any sense of the word. … You’re spending a lot of time on the road on, like, at airports and airplanes, trains, and then, you know, you’re stressed and nervous for the show, and then you get to do the show, and then you’re home at four or five a.m.

The upshot of these intensive work patterns and travel schedules was that free time was taken up by an “extreme… recovery phase” (Ollie) in which “your body is, like, recuperating, is recovering” (Josh). Respondents discussed in depth how these intense work patterns affected their physical health and personal life, recalling that they were “missing out on things like weddings and birthdays” (Ollie), continually “knackered from traveling” (Emily), “aging really fast” and “always feeling anxious” (Josh). Yet, even those DJs who had some intuitive sense of the unsustainability of their working practices felt trapped by them, lacking the mental space to consider alternatives and, typical of creative workers more broadly, feeling a need to accept all offers of work because of a fear that turning down work would make one less employable or be seen as a personal failing (McRobbie, “Re-Thinking”):

It had been a lingering feeling for the couple years before. I felt like I was on a carousel which was going really fast, and I didn’t know how to get off, because I was booked six or eight months in advance. It’s very hard to say no to things that far in advance, because you don’t know how you’re going to feel at the time. (David)

The lockdown, however, put an abrupt stop to live work activity and slowed down the rapidly spinning carousel. Thus, while the enforced break had detrimental impacts outlined in the previous section, it equally provided the DJs in this study the time and space to do things that their normal working conditions had prevented:

Just like actually slowing down… remembering the enjoyment of cooking food and just doing simple things, it’s nice. (David)

I just had more time to do, like, healthy stuff. I didn’t go out obviously that much. I slept normal hours. I worked out. (Josh)

I had a year of no social media, which was really nice. (Lorenzo)

During the pandemic I was much more available [for loved ones], and I was sleeping for eight hours a night. (Ollie)

The common thread in these accounts is that, in the absence of the demands of live work, participants began to feel “like a normal human being again” (Josh), which, prior to lockdown, was described as something they “didn’t have… time to be” (Ollie). For many of the DJs in the sample, the benefits accrued by this enforced change in pace of life brought into sharp relief the sacrifices and costs brought about by their careers:

The pandemic was actually a bit of a wake-up call. I sort of knew what was going on, like I knew that I was missing out on things and that I wasn’t seeing my friends on weekends and [so on]. But you don’t truly feel it until you actually sort of take a step back, I guess, and get to participate [in normal life]. And during the pandemic… things really slowed down, so I got much more of a sense of all of the things that maybe I’d kind of sacrificed. So I made a decision to step away from DJing. (Ollie)

Basically, about a month into lockdown, I just felt really uncomfortable and really out of sorts, and I basically was, like, “oh, what I’m feeling right now is that I’ve got time off.” Which, in the past, when you had a month off, it would be, like, “you’ve gotta get everything done, you’ve gotta get in the studio.” And I felt like I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t even want to think about DJing. I had a complete, like, aversion to everything. And then I had this epiphany, like a month in, or a couple of months in, and I realized that I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be a giant name on a festival lineup. I don’t want to be part of this rat race anymore. I want to do what I want to do. I want to play exactly for the right parties. I’m out of that competitive headspace. I almost visualized my ego, and I thought to myself, “I’m happy to be forgotten by people.” Not that that is going to happen, but I was making peace with it. So I spoke to my agent, and I said that when things go back to normal, I want to be DJing 70% less. (David)

Overall, therefore, the artificial break created by the lockdowns gave the DJs in this study an opportunity to step off the carousel. It was possible to say “no” to work and to enjoy a personal life without the feelings of failure and self-blame so often associated with independent creative careers. This enabled some of the DJs to enter a different headspace regarding their careers and working practices.

The lockdown thus had a double-edged nature: While it was obviously a threat to DJs’ careers and livelihoods, it simultaneously enabled reflection upon those careers and offered potential recalibration toward more sustainable or rewarding futures. This double-edged nature was noted by several of the DJs in this study:

I was quite worried [about lockdown]. But, yeah, all of that stuff about friends and family was, like, wonderful and a direct side effect of the pandemic happening. (Ollie)

The space that lockdown created, which was a bit uncomfortable, definitely in the end became beneficial. (David)

I know the pandemic was bad for my career maybe, but—or for my finances really—but, for me, personally, it was kind of great. (Josh)

Conclusion

Given the undoubted challenges the Covid lockdowns caused for everyone, including creative workers and DJs, the positive reaction to it from a good proportion of our sample may seem surprising at first glance. It was certainly not what we were expecting going into the project. In hindsight, however, the DJs’ responses are understandable reactions to the problematic nature of creative labor. As outlined in an earlier section of this article, while working in the creative industries can be fulfilling and offer autonomy unavailable elsewhere, those benefits come at a high price. Creative workers are highly individualized, lacking many of the support structures provided by conventional employers or the state (McRobbie, “Re-Thinking” 33). Furthermore, with the oversupply of labor, creative workers are forced to take low- or nonpaying gigs in order to develop a reputation and to relentlessly self-promote in order to keep one’s name current (Haynes and Marshall). In such circumstances, self-exploitation is almost inevitable (Banks and Hesmondhalgh). Overall, then, the double-edged nature of the responses in our sample can perhaps be understood as reflecting two connected elements of the conditions of creative labor. On the one hand, the lockdowns exacerbated the structural precarity of the DJs, increasing their financial insecurity as their main source of income evaporated and as they fell through the cracks of government support schemes. On the other hand, the lockdowns enforced a pause on the stresses created by the need to maintain a public profile, to self-promote, to seek new gigs, and so on. Small wonder, perhaps, that many of the professional DJs in our sample saw the lockdowns as something of a relief from the unremitting pressures associated with their chosen careers. It is also noteworthy that, since the resumption of live music performances, a number of high-profile artists, such as Arlo Parks and Sam Fender, have canceled shows or tours because of the impact of touring on their mental health (Barton), suggesting that greater reflection about the costs of being a creative worker may be becoming more widespread.

The DJs’ responses may also reflect a broader social trend that was reported during the pandemic. Initially dubbed “the great resignation,” employment data from the U.S.A. indicated that large numbers of people were quitting their jobs and that companies were struggling to fill vacancies (Kamal). While the media reporting of this phenomenon glossed over the complexities of the data, there is accumulated anecdotal evidence of large numbers of people, prompted by the pandemic, rethinking their relationship to work: older middle-aged workers bringing forward their retirement, for example (Sternheimer) or younger workers shifting to lower-paid but less stressful jobs (Roose). To that end, it has been suggested that “great rethink” is a better conceptualization than “great resignation” (Gulati). Reasons for these changes may be varied and complex—driven by feelings of burnout, of toxic employment cultures, of commuting patterns—but it is clear that the sudden and dramatic changes caused to all social practices opened, for some, the opportunity to reflect upon personal relationships, work-life balance, and life goals.

The accounts of the beneficial aspects of lockdown from some of the DJs in our sample might be interpreted within this context as offering an implicit critique of the working conditions for creative laborers. However, as with the great resignation-rethink itself, it is important to recognize the relatively “privileged” position of our sample. They are well-established performers with “brand recognition” enabling them to be confident they would get bookings once the restrictions were over. And they had at least a little money in the bank to fall back on. A large number of DJs more broadly, those with no savings and less secure future earnings, will have less agency in their decision making. By and large, the amateur DJs in our project were desperate to get back gigging in order to make their names. And, to be clear, we are not saying that our DJs had a wonderful time during lockdown or that it was a stress-free experience. They reported the same kind of anxieties and challenges as have been widely reported elsewhere. However, it is clear that, for many of them, the lockdowns ended up providing opportunity as much as threat. The forcible halt of live performances enabled them to get off the “carousel” and to reflect upon the harmful effects that working in the creative industries tends to have on people like themselves.

The defamiliarization of our everyday practices enables us to see them with new eyes rather than merely carrying on with what has become “normal.” As with the great resignation/rethink itself, it is unclear whether there will be meaningful long-term changes for these DJs as a result of their pandemic experience. But, for a moment at least, it provided a chance to glimpse alternative possibilities in which the burdens of creative labor do not exact so heavy a toll.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

No specific funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Lee Marshall

Lee Marshall is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published numerous books and articles on the popular music industry, musicians’ working practices, and music consumption.

Martha Whitfield

Martha Whitfield is an independent scholar from the UK. She is currently working in the EDM online media industry.

Notes

1. Our concern in this article is with the impact on the DJs’ own incomes, but it should be noted that many of the DJs interviewed also expressed concern about the livelihoods of others involved in the dance music industry. Josh, for instance, highlighted how he was “very keen on making sure that everyone that I was working with was still getting paid,” and several DJs mentioned performing at fundraising events for venues they were connected to. David described it as recognizing that “okay, well, you’ve been doing this for me for years, booking me, paying me. And I can try and repay that.”

2. Berghain, in Berlin, is one of the world’s most famous clubs and particularly important for techno. It was closed because of the pandemic from March 2020 to October 2021.