Keep the Money

A small party in London books Jane Fitz. The budget is, in her words, tiny. At the end of the night she tells them to keep her fee:

it's probably more important that you have the money than I do

Spread it among the other DJs, she says. She has done this more than once.

The clip comes from her conversation with Scuba, and it is worth watching in full because the argument she builds is more careful than the version that travels.

What she is actually proposing

Her practical suggestion is modest. Make some space once or twice a year. Not a policy, not a percentage of your calendar — a couple of nights.

The reasoning is economic rather than sentimental. She earns her living elsewhere, from the bigger bookings, which is what frees her to do the small ones. And a room that gets a name it could never normally afford will have a night it remembers, and will fill. The value flows in both directions, and only one side of it appears on an invoice.

There is a version of this that is just arithmetic. A headline fee at professional rates can be larger than everything a two-hundred-capacity room takes on the door. Waive it and the same money becomes four other artists paid properly, or a sound system hire, or the promoter not losing money for the third time this year.

The part that keeps it from being a lecture

Then she does something I did not expect, and it is the reason the clip is worth more than its headline.

She declines to make it a duty.

Her own reason for doing it is biographical. She came up in those rooms, she knows them from the inside, she is still connected to the people running them. That history is why it feels obvious to her. And she says plainly that she does not need to — it is her choosing to.

Then she extends the same logic to people who don't. If you are a big DJ who never came through that world, why would you do it? It would not make sense to you. She calls the opposite position completely legitimate, which is a generosity you almost never hear in this argument.

That distinction matters practically, not just rhetorically. The moment "established artists should support small promoters" becomes an expectation, it turns into unpaid labour that people can be shamed into, and the shaming lands hardest on artists who are closer to the edge than they look from outside.

The line about accountants

The exchange closes on something bleaker. Scuba says he cannot see any DJ demonstrating social responsibility to anyone except their accountant. Fitz answers that this is probably fair.

I think that is roughly right and worth sitting with rather than arguing away. The structures do not reward it. Nothing in a booking agent's incentives, a festival's programming or a platform's metrics assigns any value to the night you played for nothing in a room of two hundred people. It shows up nowhere. It is invisible to every system that decides what happens to your career.

Which is precisely why it only ever happens as a personal decision, and why asking the industry to produce it structurally is asking the wrong thing of the wrong party.

Both of them are worth your time

A note that has nothing to do with the argument: Jane Fitz is a genuinely exceptional DJ — twenty-five years in, still associated with the parts of house and techno that never got easy. Scuba is as well, and his podcast is one of the few places where people in this music talk properly about how any of it works, at length, without a press cycle attached. If the clip is the first you have heard of either, that is a good problem to have.

Where I sit with this

I am not a name that fills anyone's room, so nothing I say here costs me anything, and I want to be upfront about that before saying it.

But the principle scales downward as well as up. Whatever level you are at, there is someone one rung below running a night on their own money. I have taken early slots, played rooms of forty people, and taken less than a fee where the night could not carry it — and I intend to keep doing that as long as it is sustainable, for the same reason Fitz gives: those rooms are where I learned this, and I am still connected to the people in them.

I would add one caveat she does not need to make, because she is further along. Doing this only works if something else pays. That is the argument I made in keep the day job, and it is the practical foundation under her position too — she can be generous with small promoters because the big bookings exist. Generosity without an income behind it is just a slower way of quitting.

Source: Jane Fitz in conversation with Paul Rose (Scuba) on Not A Diving Podcast; the clip circulated in January 2026 via a third-party account rather than from the show directly, and the specific episode is not identified in the repost. The quoted line follows that clip.