Following the publication of Forbes’s annual DJ rich list it has emerged that, for the third consecutive year, none of the names mentioned are actually DJs.
The claim that not a single person on the Forbes’s list is a DJ have been made by everyone associated with relevant contemporary dance music but it is believed that Forbes’s will not be altering the list to include the actual highest earning “proper” DJs like Carl Cox and Dave Clarke and will instead stick to the loosest definition of DJ meaning “pop star who stands next to DJing equipment while music is playing”.
Some people have suggested an alternative rich list that takes into account time actually spent DJing as a sign that you’re a DJ rather than time spent pressing play, performing heart hands or throwing cakes into the audience like a moron at a children’s birthday party.
“If the list was called ‘the highest paid popstars and sell outs who make lowest common denominator noisy garbage masquerading as dance music directed at undiscerning American teenagers’ then they’d all be justifiably included on the list,” claimed one commentator, Baz Jackson, dance music blogger and a former big room house fan who ‘copped on and stopped listening to it’ after it started going to shit around the same time EDM started getting big “or, to borrow from Don McLean – the day the music died”.
“Cursory glances at reality have shown that none of those named on the list could be considered a DJ in the truest sense of the word,” continued Baz while citing some criteria of a DJ that those listed fail to adhere to, namely – live mixing, beat-matching, playing tracks other than their own and using their profile to promote forward thinking yet fun and credible dance music “like the vast majority of their peers in the underground”.
“The rich list in its current format is just a misnomer considering they’re not DJs,” concluded Baz. “What they’ve done instead is the dance music equivalent of publishing a list of the world’s highest paid professional footballers but then populating that list solely with overweight, grubby men whose closest relationship to a football is playing FIFA 2014 on their Mum’s couch in a soiled pair of Cristian Ronaldo underpants.”
