The Wrong Target

Richie Hawtin has been complaining about influencer DJs, and the line that travelled is that some of them are

only there because of their follower count

He goes further in places — that the rise of social-media DJs is, in his words, simply shit, and that follower counts have become the gateway into the scene. The trade press picked it up; the clip did the rest.

To his credit he does not pretend this is new. He says the friction between underground and commercial has always been there, and that what matters is holding to your own idea of the work even when it runs against whatever is currently winning. That caveat keeps the argument from being nostalgia, and it is the part of it I agree with without reservation.

He is describing something that exists

The mechanism is not in dispute. Reach is measurable before a ticket is sold and musical judgement is not, so a booker committing money weeks in advance has an obvious reason to prefer the number they can see. Follower count functions as a gateway because it is legible, and legibility beats quality in any market where decisions have to be made in advance and at speed.

Which is the same complaint I published a few weeks ago from the opposite end of the ladder, when Save Our Sound described DJs being left off lineups for having nothing to trade. From below it looks like exclusion. From above it looks like standards slipping. It is one mechanism, and both descriptions are accurate.

Where the aim goes wrong

Then the phrasing: they have no idea what they're doing. That converts a description of a system into an accusation against a group of people, and the group is mostly the wrong one.

Consider how a lot of these careers actually start. Somebody uploads a track to TikTok because it amused them. It performs. Within months a major has signed them, an agent has priced them, and they are on a stage in front of thousands that they have no equipment to hold. Some of them have said as much in public: they were not chasing this, they do not have artistic ambitions, they simply ended up here.

I am deliberately not naming anyone, and that is not squeamishness. Naming them would repeat the error — treating the individuals as the story when they are the least powerful component in it.

An A&R decided the numbers were worth a contract. An agent decided what to charge. A booker decided this person should play before the headliner. Those people are experienced, well paid, and specifically employed to assess whether somebody can do the thing. If a performer cannot hold the room, that is not a character flaw in the performer. It is three professionals in a row deciding that the question did not matter enough to ask.

Aim there. It is a smaller group, it is far more responsible, and unlike a twenty-two-year-old with a viral clip it can actually change its behaviour.

Which settles an argument from earlier

There is a Codex entry where Zanias declines to call music a business and asks to call it an ecosystem instead. I disagreed at the time, in a number without a denominator, on the grounds that rent gets paid or it doesn't and pretending otherwise mostly serves whoever is not paying you.

This is the cleaner proof. A system that signs a person because a clip performed, prices them against the same metric, and places them on a stage without asking whether they can hold it is behaving exactly like a business optimising a funnel. The artist is inventory acquired on a signal. Nothing about that process is ecosystem logic, and it is worth being clear-eyed that the person most damaged by it is very often the one who got signed — sent out to be judged in public against a standard nobody prepared them for, with a shelf life set by the same algorithm that picked them up.

What is actually lost

The cost is not that unqualified people exist. Every scene has always had people above their level, usually briefly.

The cost is the slot. A main-stage booking given to someone who did not want a career is one not given to someone who has spent ten years building toward exactly that, and who would have delivered. Multiply it across a festival season and you get a circuit that trains nobody, promotes nothing, and wonders in public why the middle of the bill has gone hollow.

And one hedge, because certainty here is cheap. Some people who arrived by accident stay, get serious and get very good — there are acts who started as a novelty and are now the reason to buy a ticket. Arriving badly does not determine what someone becomes. Assuming otherwise is just gatekeeping with better manners, and this page has already argued at length against being kept out for reasons unrelated to the music.

Source: Richie Hawtin, in remarks credited to a Safe Trip Talk conversation and circulated by Festifeed on 19 May 2026; the substance was also reported in the electronic music trade press. The quoted fragment follows that reporting rather than a transcript of the original interview.