Each year, Digital DJ Tips conducts its Global Digital DJ Census, the biggest DJ survey anywhere in the world. At the end of 2016 when we conducted the most recent survey, over 12,000 DJs took part, meaning this survey offers a unique and accurate reflection of our audience and, by extension, of the DJing world as a whole. And today, we’re letting you in on the headline results…
The results slideshow
Navigate forward and back, and use the pause button to look longer at individual slides
Some key takeaways…
- DJing is no longer a hobby of the young – we have a huge audience from 18 to 55 and over, pretty evenly spread throughout. They’re almost all male, though
- DJing is still attracting new people: 50% of our audience has been DJing under 5 years with 20% under 12 months
- Our students are spread among all types of DJing – party DJs, mobile, club, turntablists, controllerists, producers. Becoming a DJ/producer is the ultimate aim of the majority of DJs, though
- Controllers still rule, Windows trumps Mac, and Serato, Traktor and Virtual DJ still boss the software world (although Rekordbox is gaining fast)
- Beatport and iTunes between them cover the needs of most of our audience for buying music online, with the others barely getting a look in
- Spotify rules streaming (although less than half of you subscribe to a streaming service), but Apple Music is gaining fast
- Facebook is your favourite social media platform by far, and the majority of you use YouTube – but Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram have sizeable followings, too
- Digital DJ Tips readers also regularly check out DJ Tech Tools and Mixmag online, but no other DJ-related sites pull more than 10% of our audience
- More than two-thirds of our readers earn at least something from their DJing – although for most it is a small amount of their overall income
Finally…
The results are fascinating, but what you don’t see are the full results (ie actual numbers of respondents, comments, and the questions we don’t publish for space reasons), or the year on year shifts.
We’ve alluded to some of the latter above, but additionally, what we’re seeing is both a maturing of the audience (in age and in skills), more DJs earning more money, and a huge interest in music production.
What we also note is the interest in other types of DJing by more and more DJs – the crossover between mobile, club, DJ/producers, turntablism, controllerism, open-format and so on is bigger year by year. Basically, DJs seem increasingly interested in learning about this great hobby/job as a whole, and not just sticking to their own little ghettos. This is a development we both encourage, and enjoy being a part of.
Until next year! 🙂
Want to add your voice to these results? Feel free to comment below…
Phil Morse
