Would You Still Do It?

Jaymie Silk published sixteen slides in January under the heading Food for Thoughts, and the first one does not warm up:

Being a DJ doesn't make sense in 2026

Underneath: social media burnout, blood money, and a scene that still pretends to care. House, techno, rap, hardtechno, afrohouse — he notes it is the same thing everywhere.

It would be easy to file this as pessimism. It isn't. The last slide argues that DJing can still make sense and can even be healthy. Everything between is the list of conditions.

The myths

He starts with the vocabulary the scene uses about itself. Peace, love, unity and respect. Community. Our scene. No racism, no misogyny, no homophobia.

His word for this is the starter pack — present in almost every scene, at least at the beginning.

That "at least at the beginning" is doing a lot of work, and it is fairer than a straight accusation of hypocrisy. These are not lies. They are promises that small scenes keep easily, because everyone knows each other and there is nothing much to fight over, and that get quietly renegotiated once there is money, status and a lineup to protect.

The exhaustion

He has been watching small DJs post that they are stopping. The response he notes — who even knows them, nobody cares — misses what is actually being reported.

It is not failure. It is exhaustion from playing the social media game: making content, chasing followers, trying to be seen, all in order to be booked and recognised as an artist, instead of practising and sharing what you love with real people.

That is a precise description of a job that has grown a second job inside it, where the second one is louder, never finishes, and is graded publicly every day.

The question that settles it

Then, midway through, the test. If you had decks in a room and nobody around — would you still do it? Would you still consider yourself a DJ if you loved digging and practising, but never got a gig?

Why are you doing this in the first place?

The point isn't purity. It's diagnosis. If the answer is yes, the industry can disappoint you without ending you, because the practice was never contingent on the industry. If the answer is no, then every disappointment is existential, which is exactly the mechanism that burns people out and makes them quit.

What do you bring to the dancefloor

Silk's next move is the sharpest formulation I have read of a thing I have circled repeatedly on this page. Social media, he writes, created a feeling of connection and a feeling of isolation at once — and the distortion of online fame replaced the question that mattered: what do you bring to the dancefloor?

And because nearly everyone now has access to the tools and can present themselves as an artist, the audience plays the game too. Which is why the next slide lands so flatly: the audience wants entertainment, escapism, a night to forget the world — and for many people it doesn't matter, as long as the music is loud.

That is bleak, and it is also an opening. If most of the room is not listening closely, the people who are listening closely become the whole point of doing it carefully. I have written about what a set owes a room and about selection and order as the actual craft. This is the reason to keep bothering with either.

Who actually owns the room

Then he does something most posts of this kind avoid: he names the ownership.

In June 2024 the private equity firm KKR bought Superstruct Entertainment for around €1.3 billion, acquiring more than eighty-five festivals — Sónar, Field Day, Lost Village among them. In January 2025 Boiler Room was sold by DICE to Superstruct. KKR's broader portfolio has included weapons manufacturers, defence contractors and companies advertising property in occupied territory, which is why artists including Ikonika, DJ Slugo and DJ Clent withdrew from Boiler Room events in protest.

Boiler Room's own statement is the part worth sitting with. It said the investments categorically do not align with its values — and that it is unable to divest, because it has no say in its ownership.

I wrote about the equity nobody shared, where labels took shares in the platform that would set artists' rates. This is the same structure with the roles moved around: the cultural layer is owned by people whose other holdings have nothing to do with culture, and the people inside it find out what they are part of at the same time as everyone else.

Silk's line is that even a small artist, nowhere near those festivals, quickly sees how the network works.

The mask

Two slides that will be uncomfortable for anyone who has tried to get booked.

Talent isn't the main factor. It's about who you know, the game you can play, and the mask you can wear. And then: when you trade your authenticity for a character, where is the line? At what point are you betraying yourself and others?

He does not answer, which is the honest choice, because there isn't a general answer. Everyone doing this professionally performs a version of themselves. The question is only whether you still recognise the person doing it.

The political weight

The section that will cost him followers is the one about where this music comes from.

His argument: everything we do is political, because we live inside a system rather than outside it. Cultures born in marginalised communities — non-white, queer, trans, working-class — get used in a capitalist way, for entertainment only, once value exists and monetisation becomes possible from outside those communities. Political identity, he writes, is useful to the marketplace exactly as long as it is tokenisable and not a threat to economic growth.

You can dispute pieces of that. The historical claim underneath it is not really disputable: house and techno came out of Black and queer communities in Chicago, Detroit and New York, and the money that the global festival circuit now moves does not flow back to those communities in any proportion to what was taken.

The myth that needs to die

Near the end, a line that pulls in the opposite direction from everything above it, and is my favourite thing in the whole sequence:

If you are creative, you will be creative until your last breath. The myth of the struggling artist needs to die.

Both halves matter. The first is a reason to stop treating the career as the proof — you will keep making things regardless, so the question is only under what conditions. The second says the romance of the broke artist is a story that mainly benefits whoever is not paying you.

That is the argument I made in keep the day job from the other end. Refusing to be poor is not a betrayal of the work. It is usually the only thing that lets the work continue.

Exist outside the marketplace

His conclusion is four sentences. If you do it only for money: quit. If you do it for fame: forget about it. DJing can still make sense, and can even be healthy — but only if you learn to exist outside the myths of the industry.

He closes with James Baldwin, on the artist's quarrel with their society being a lover's quarrel: the point of the fight is to show the beloved to itself, and by doing so to make freedom real. Which reframes the whole sixteen slides. None of this is an exit note. It is what criticism from inside sounds like when the person writing it intends to stay.

Existing outside the marketplace is not a mystical state. In practice it is mundane and slightly boring: an income that does not depend on bookings, records sold directly rather than streamed for fractions, a mailing list instead of a follower count, and a definition of a good night that a promoter's spreadsheet cannot overrule.

So: decks in a room, nobody around. Would you still do it?

I would. That is the only part of this I am completely sure about.

Source: Jaymie Silk, Food for Thoughts, posted 7 January 2026; the quoted line follows that post. The Baldwin passage he cites is paraphrased here rather than reproduced. Ownership and acquisition figures are from contemporaneous trade reporting on the KKR–Superstruct deal and the Boiler Room sale.