The DJ Mag awards used to be prestigious appreciations of the finest talents in the dance music scene, with pioneers such as Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold among the past winners. However, since the mid 2000s, it has become more and more of a mockery each year but still grows in importance, to the despair of many. Just this week, the 2015 results were announced and DJ Mag have now hit the very bottom of the seemingly endless pit of EDM (electronic dance music) oblivion.
Having won it for the past two years, it was assumed by many that Hardwell was likely to achieve the top spot again with the only competition coming in the form of young producer and DJ Martin Garrix, a divisive but clearly talented and entertaining Dutch youngster. However, seemingly from out of nowhere, the duo Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike seized the limelight to general shock and horror. The two, who are often surrounded by allegations that they don’t even produce many of their own tracks, are widely considered the jokes of the electronic scene, with generic, bland and recycled tracks along with poor DJing skills and awfully gimmicky performances.
So, how did these jokers even win? Well, they literally bought their way straight to victory. Back in July, it was revealed that the duo were paying women at the popular EDM festival Tomorrowland to encourage people into “voting” for them on special iPads. Though DJs are known to rely on their popularity to propel them to the top of the list, this was by far the most blatantly obvious and downright embarrassing attempt to leech off their fans and it worked.
The problems with the DJ Mag awards began to appear towards the end of the 2000s when it swiftly evolved into a pure popularity contest, as indicated by David Guetta’s victory in 2011, another pitifully stale producer and DJ. As this became more and more apparent and widespread, so too did the awards grow in prominence, dramatically affecting the amount of bookings DJs received. Clearly, top spot on the list came with huge financial gain.
The other major problem is that the awards aren’t even about DJs anymore. It is so clearly oriented around producers now that talent on the decks plays very little factor in the voting. This is especially true as you move down the list, with artists like Carnage and Quintino displaying absolute zero talent for mixing. Add this to the fact that DJs such as A-Track, who is at the forefront of the renaissance in “real djing,” don’t even feature on the list.
The EDM scene is suffering from the DJ Mag Awards. It dilutes the scene into a laughing stock of copy and paste artists and soulless tracks that is a completely unfair representation of the genre. From the growth of trance and house in the early 90s, the birth of dubstep in the early 2000s all the way through to the relatively recent surge in progressive house and the meteoric rise of labels such as Spinnin’ Records, the scene has always been known for its raw energy and ever changing styles. These awards encapsulate a dystopian future where producers simply release the same track over and over and where DJs just press play. How brutally depressing that would be.
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