You’re up on all the basics. That’s why we’ve compiled six of the deeper sorts of insights shared by speakers at Miami and Chicago Music Nexus.
It doesn’t take long to piece together a working roadmap of the dance music industry. As a DJ, you know you need to allocate time for producing music, creating social media content, and networking. This is assuming you’ve already invested in basic brand elements like a logo and EPK.
But it takes more than that to succeed. Like any creative field, dance music is highly competitive. You need to throw everything but the kitchen sink at your career to have any hope of standing out from the thousands of artists trying to make names for themselves.
This is where Chicago Music Nexus shines. Conference organizers Olivia Mancuso and Matt “Sherm” Sherman strive to offer attendees actionable insights that they can implement to further their careers. Sometimes, it gets pretty granular. But that attention to detail is exactly what you need to get your project off the ground.
EDM Identity has compiled the below list of DJ tips given at previous editions — plus a few at the March debut of Miami Music Nexus. Of course, nothing compares to the wealth of knowledge afforded to artists attending Chicago Music Nexus itself. Our best piece of advice is not to miss this year’s edition at Concord Music Hall and The Joinery from November 21-22.
Check out a breakdown of this year’s speakers and panels, and purchase tickets to the 2026 edition on the Chicago Music Nexus website!
Six Seldom-Heard DJ Tips Given at Miami and Chicago Music Nexus
Don’t guard your music so closely that you forego major co-signs.
Most producers envision a straightforward path to success: You get your music signed to a label, and then a bigger label, and then an even bigger label, ad nauseam until you’re taking a private jet from gig to gig. And your music is the fuel that gets you to that destination, so you’d better guard it carefully.
Henry Fong sees it differently. “If I finish a song and it’s done, I don’t give a fuck,” the Los Angeles DJ and producer said bluntly at Chicago Music Nexus. “I’ll just send it to Skrillex or DJ Snake or whatever. Like, ‘Here, there’s no release date. I don’t know what’s going to happen with it.’ And then all of a sudden so and so plays it, and then so and so asks for it, and then so and so plays it. And then I post another clip on social media. Now three months have gone by and I’ve had enough time and opportunity for those songs to really catch wind.”
Fong continued: “Because if you guys go work with a record label, they’re going to give you this two-week timeline … What the hell am I going to do in two weeks? Two weeks is not enough time for any story to develop around these songs. So try to give yourself a little bit more space, and the real work for me happens long, long, long before the song comes out.”
Money isn’t everything when it comes to gigs.
Picture this: Two promoters are interested in booking you for DJ sets in different cities on the same night. The answer is simply to take the one that pays more, right? Not necessarily, according to The Team booking agent Alan Gary.
At Miami Music Nexus, Gary pointed out that strengthening bonds with established organizers pays dividends in the long run. “I think that there are a lot of moments in artists’ careers where you’ll have opportunities to go take a money grab per se, or there might be a random promoter that pops up in a market that you’ve never heard of, but they’re offering you more,” he said. “Oftentimes, that does not work out in your favor. It’s worth sticking with the tried-and-true and growing patiently and steadily.”
In fact, sometimes it helps to book a “sacrifice tour.”
NÛ MGMT CEO Paul Campbell has taken this approach to early career investment a step further. In the past, he’s organized shows for no other reason than to farm social media content that helps generate buzz.
“We used to call it the ‘sacrifice tour,'” Campbell shared at Miami Music Nexus. “I didn’t care how many people showed up. If I could get a video of me and 17 of my friends in the booth, I could make that look insane online. And bro, ten sacrifice shows might be enough to ignite some attention.”
For example, Campbell said, a promoter might come across clips from your sacrifice tour on social media and consider you for a gig. “Perception matters,” he argued. “I hate to minimize the industry to how much you can, like, finagle and play the game, but there’s a game there to be had.”
Build a community that will engage with you on more than one social media platform.
Social media is still a relatively new field. Platforms fall in and out of popularity — some, like MySpace, even completely stop offering the services that made them popular. Don’t make the mistake of depending on any single app to help get your message to your target audience.
“Vine went away, but tons of the creators that were on Vine are now on Instagram and they’re on TikTok,” said Hope Lansing of Calculated Creative at Chicago Music Nexus. “And they’re thriving because they created a community and they created people that like them for them.”
“Platforms are always going to change.” Lansing went on. “We’re never going to be able to get away from that, unfortunately. But as long as you have a community around you and people that like you for what you’re doing and what you’re posting, you’re never going to have a problem with that.”
View count doesn’t need to be the benchmark for all of your social media posts.
There’s a certain social proof that comes with online visibility. A high view count signals to many users that the content being served to them is worth consuming. But depending on what you hope to accomplish, other metrics might be more important for a given post.
At Chicago Music Nexus, Insomniac Radio host Emma Kapotes shared, “I used to always ask myself, what is the point of this post? … If I was like, this one is for comments only, I didn’t give a fuck if it got 50 views or 100,000 views. I just wanted a lot of comments. And that relieved pressure for me.”
After all, comments tell the algorithm that one account’s content is relevant to the other. In the long run, this leads to the increased view count necessary for valuable brand awareness.
“I would post these little slides and it would literally just ask a question,” Kapotes said. “It was just straight up text, like, ‘Who’s like an underrated artist we should know about right now?’ It would get like 50 likes, but there’d be 200 comments on it. So think about that as well. Do you want this to be really heavily shared? Is it comments you want? Is it views you want? Follows? And you can look at those metrics in your analytics as well, but that always helped me.”
Stay true to yourself, even if it doesn’t align with music trends (yet).
At a glance, it may look like dance music doesn’t allow for a great deal of individuality. A new trend pops up — be it hard techno, Afro house, or the drum and bass resurgence — and artists seem jump on the bandwagon in droves. You don’t need to be one of them, according to Mario Danza of Define Group.
“If you started the foundation of your brand, you shouldn’t just change that because of one small thing,” he said at Chicago Music Nexus. “Prime example, look at Sammy Virji, right? He was in UK garage for how many years before it eventually took off?”
Danza continued: “There’s a lot of success stories like that, Chris Lake being one of them. He brought back tech house seven, eight years ago. He was doing stuff like ‘Boneless,’ but then he transitioned, and he stuck with it. He stayed true to his brand and now that’s where he’s at.”
