Keep the Day Job

IMOGEN — who runs the Wigs party series, label and workshops out of London — sat down for a record dig at All My Friends in Hackney Wick and gave the least romantic career advice on the internet:

if you can keep your full-time job as long as possible

Not forever. As long as possible. And the reason she gives is not financial prudence but affection: you will have more love for it in the long run, and a more balanced life.

She is right, and I want to say why in more mechanical terms, because "don't quit your job" sounds like caution and it is actually about the work.

What a wage actually buys

The usual framing is that a day job funds the music — gear, studio time, the records. True, but minor. Money for equipment has never been the constraint that kills people.

What a salary buys is the ability to say no.

No to the booking in the wrong room for a fee you need. No to the promoter who wants ninety minutes of the obvious thing. No to a residency that will eat every Friday for a year and teach you nothing. And, in the booth, no to the safe record at the moment the floor wobbles — because if your rent doesn't turn on tonight going well, you can afford to let it not go well.

Go full time and every artistic decision quietly becomes a rent decision. Not because you sold out, but because arithmetic does not care about your intentions. The DJs I know who went full time earliest are, without exception, the ones whose sets sound most like everyone else's — not from lack of taste, but because they could never afford a bad night.

The part nobody puts on the poster

It is a balancing act, and it is not free. I would be lying by omission to present the day job as a clean answer.

Two jobs is two jobs. The studio hours are the tired hours, after the ones you already sold. You turn down the Thursday that would have mattered because you are working Friday morning. Tours longer than a weekend are structurally impossible. Sometimes you produce nothing for a month because the other job ate it, and that month does not come back.

There is also no graduation. No income level arrives and tells you it is safe to jump. Whenever you go, it is a bet — the day job only changes the odds and the timing, never the fact that it is a bet.

And it is not one of the paths society hands out. The script goes: train, qualify, advance, secure. Doing two things properly at once reads from the outside as indecision, as a hobby that got out of hand, as something you will grow out of. People will keep asking when you are going to choose. The honest answer — that choosing is the part that would damage it — does not fit the question they meant.

What it looks like here

I write software for a living. That is the job, and it is not a placeholder until the music works — it is load-bearing, and it is the reason the music can be what it is.

Because here is what changes when a track has to earn. It has to work. It has to fit a slot, land inside the first thirty seconds, be legible enough that somebody can file it, sit close enough to what is currently moving that a label can see where it goes. None of those are musical requirements. They are product requirements, and they arrive dressed as taste.

A track that doesn't have to pay rent has no such obligations. It can be too long. It can take four minutes to arrive. It can be the specific, slightly wrong thing it wanted to be, and never explain itself. Everything I have released is one hundred per cent mine in a way that has nothing to do with authenticity as a pose — it just means nothing is in there because a market asked for it.

There is a bleaker version of this I am aware of daily. I spend the working day building systems that optimise for engagement, which is the same machinery I spent twoarticles complaining about. Knowing how the sausage is made is a decent inoculation against wanting the sausage.

And the necessary caveat: software pays well. This arrangement is available to me partly through luck about which skill I happened to have. Plenty of people work jobs that leave nothing behind at the end of the day — no money, no hours, no attention. The freedom I am describing is real, and it is not evenly distributed, which is the whole problem the second half of this piece is about.

The half of her point that should worry you more

Then she says something sharper, almost as an aside.

When her friends were at university, everyone wanted to run a party. Everyone wanted to put on a student night. That has stopped, she says, because there is no money to do it — everything is too expensive. So people turn inward instead. You can practise on a friend's decks. You can get a cracked copy of Ableton.

And so everyone wants to be a DJ, and nobody wants to be a promoter, and nobody wants to run a record shop, because all the things that cost money are dying.

She said this, it is worth noting, sitting inside a record shop.

What being a promoter actually involves

It is worth spelling out, because the DJ side of this economy is visible and the promoter side is not.

A promoter commits money before anyone has bought anything. Deposits and guarantees to artists — payable whether forty people come or four hundred. Venue hire. Security, which is not optional and not cheap. Insurance. Licensing. Sound hire if the room's rig isn't up to it. Print, ads, the flyer someone has to design. All of that is spent weeks out, against a number nobody knows yet.

Then the audience buys on the day. That behaviour hardened after the pandemic and never went back — which means the promoter is carrying full downside against a demand signal that arrives after the money is gone.

If the night sells, the artist gets paid, the venue gets paid, the bar takes the drinks, and the promoter takes what is left, which is frequently not much. If it doesn't sell, everyone else still gets paid and the promoter absorbs the difference personally. Capped upside, uncapped downside, usually unpaid labour on top. That is not a business model. It is a donation with extra steps, made by people who love the thing enough to keep making it.

IMOGEN would know — Wigs is exactly that, parties and workshops built to bring new artists through, which is the unglamorous end of this and the end that determines what the scene sounds like in ten years.

The direction after the pandemic

It is tempting to write this as a straightforward death, and that would be wrong. Berlin is the useful case, because it has just been counted properly.

The Clubcommission published Clubkultur Berlin 2026 in August, seven years after the last major survey. It finds at least 24 club and culture venues closed since 2020 — and around 25 new ones opened in the same window. Things are still being started. Renate, announced as closing at the end of 2025, reached a lease agreement that December and stayed. The scene is not being emptied out.

What has changed is whether any of it pays. In 2017, 79 per cent of Berlin clubs covered their costs; now it is 61. In 2017, 21 per cent finished the year at a loss; now it is 39. Nearly two in five.

And here is the number that reframes everything else: 83 per cent of events run at over half capacity.

The floors are full. The rooms are losing money anyway.

That is a much more specific problem than decline, and a harder one. It cannot be fixed by caring more or turning up more, because people are already turning up. Rent, energy, security and licensing have outrun what a door can reasonably charge, and admission is still 59 per cent of what a Berlin club earns. The same squeeze shows up in Britain, where the Night Time Industries Association counts a 37 per cent loss of nightclubs in four years, down to 787 by 2024 — while reporting UK electronic music generating around £2.5 billion in economic activity in 2025.

The sector is not shrinking. Its base is being asked to run at a loss. That is the same shape I described in the equity nobody shared and in what the metrics measure — value accumulating at the top of a structure while the layer that generates it is quietly defunded. This is that pattern one floor lower, in physical rooms.

The mechanism from here is grim and simple. Costs rise, so door prices rise, so a club night becomes a considered purchase rather than a Tuesday impulse. The audience that used to make scenes — broke, curious, out four nights a week — is priced out first. Fewer small rooms means fewer places to be mediocre in public, and being mediocre in public for a few years is the only way anyone has ever become good at this. Meanwhile the top of the bill costs more than ever, so the economics only work at scale, so the mid-tier disappears, so there is nowhere between a bedroom and a festival.

A scene in which only people with money can afford to be an unpaid promoter or an unbooked artist will, in fairly short order, sound like people with money.

So: yes, keep the job

Which brings the two halves together, because they are the same argument.

Keeping a day job is usually framed as a private hedge — sensible, a bit timid, faintly embarrassing. It is better understood as the thing that lets you participate in a scene that currently cannot pay its participants. Not a compromise with the work. The condition for doing the work honestly while the economics are what they are.

And if you want the ecosystem IMOGEN is describing to still exist, the useful move isn't posting about it. Buy a ticket early instead of on the door. Go to the small night. Pay for the record.

Source: IMOGEN in the Digging With Friends session at All My Friends, Hackney Wick, posted 17 November 2025; the full episode is on their YouTube channel. The quoted line follows that clip. Berlin figures are from Clubkultur Berlin 2026, the Clubcommission and Senate study presented on 7 August 2026; UK figures from Night Time Industries Association reporting.