AI In The DJ World From My Perspective
With the proliferation of AI in the world, a lot of people are examining its use from a lot of different perspectives. From efficiency to ethics, there isn’t much that AI isn’t making some kind of impact on, positive or negative, in our daily lives. I’ve done a few TikToks over the past couple of years with my thoughts on it, but I wanted to sit down and jot a more nuanced look at the whole thing when it comes to AI in the DJ world.
And I want to be upfront about where I’m coming from, because my view is genuinely split. I’m a 30-plus year IT professional. I even built an events platform called Zenvents360, and used Claude to help code it, so I’m not some technophobe shaking my fist at the future. I use these tools. I’m impressed by them. And at the very same time I’m deeply skeptical of where some of this is headed for the craft I love. Both things are true at once, and that’s exactly the tension I want to walk through.
AI In DJ Performances
There’s a general axiom about AI: it’s only as bad as it was yesterday. With its exponential learning curve, it won’t be long before it gets genuinely good at things we assumed were safe.
Look at AI video. In 2023 we all had a good laugh at the AI Will Smith trying to eat spaghetti, a melting, nightmarish mess. And it’s a fair thing to laugh at, because video is a brutally hard problem. The model has to generate facial movement, hand movement, the mouth, even the physics of how each strand of spaghetti falls. Now look at where we are barely three years later. AI is producing video you sometimes have to stare at to decide whether it’s real. That’s the curve. That’s what “only as bad as it was yesterday” means in practice.
In the consumer music world you already see Spotify and Apple rolling out AI “DJ” features that do some rudimentary beat matching. The results range from “why would you even do that” to “ok, that wasn’t half bad.” But make no mistake about what’s happening underneath. These companies are training models on professional DJs to learn how songs transition. They’ve got a wealth of data on user listening habits, which songs land in which playlists, at which times, in which order. All of that is being coalesced and fed back into improving their algorithms. The “wasn’t half bad” of today is the floor, not the ceiling.
There will come a time when it’s “good enough” for the budget customer to forgo hiring an inexpensive DJ. And it won’t stop there. It’ll hit the bar, club, and lounge scene, where some less-than-scrupulous owners are already looking to cut costs anywhere they can. I can see this tech married to camera-driven sentiment analysis, reading crowd participation in real time to decide whether to bail out of a song early or ride a genre longer. AI voice impersonation could mean your announcements are delivered by a fake James Earl Jones. These are all intuitive traits a good DJ already has, and someday AI will have a version of them too.
That being said, there are still intangibles that are genuinely hard to digitize. Reading a room isn’t always about quantifiable data but about feel. The human relationship built over months of planning. The judgment call that comes from having lived through the thing going wrong once before. This is exactly why I’ve stressed to so many DJs that the move is not to compete with the machine on the machine’s terms. The move is to lean harder into quality of service and the human touch, because that’s the part the algorithm can’t cheaply replicate. The DJs who treat their work as a commodity are the ones AI will come for first. The ones who treat it as a craft and a relationship have a moat.
AI In Marketing
AI is making major ripples through every aspect of marketing, and for a small business this cuts both ways.
On the upside, you now have a ton of “brain power” available that you simply wouldn’t have had access to before, if you know how to craft a good prompt. Drafting, brainstorming, research, reworking a clumsy paragraph into something clear, analyzing what your competitors are doing. A solo operator like me can punch well above their weight with these tools. That’s real, and pretending otherwise would be silly coming from someone who literally used Claude to help build a software platform.
But here’s the catch, and it’s a big one. When everyone has the same brain power, the brain power stops being a differentiator. If every DJ in the Hudson Valley is generating the same competent, characterless blog posts from the same prompts, then competent and characterless becomes the new baseline noise, and nobody stands out. The advantage doesn’t go to the person using AI. It goes to the person using AI plus something the AI doesn’t have, which in my case is twenty-plus years of actually doing this, real stories from real weddings, opinions I’ve earned the hard way. AI can sharpen my voice. It can’t be my voice.
AI Slop And Fatigue
Which brings me to the thing I think we’re only beginning to reckon with: slop and fatigue.
We are being flooded with AI-generated content. Articles, images, videos, music, all of it produced at effectively zero cost and infinite volume. And people are starting to feel it. There’s a growing fatigue, a sort of reflexive suspicion when you sense that the thing you’re reading or looking at was churned out by a machine with nobody really behind it. The uncanny stock-photo sheen of AI imagery. The blog post that says a lot of words without ever saying anything. The playlist that’s technically fine and emotionally dead.
I think this fatigue is going to become one of the most important forces in marketing and in the arts over the next few years, and I think it favors people like me, the ones insisting on doing the human thing. There’s a reason I put “No AI, no gimmicks” right on my home page and mean it about the actual performance. When I curate a wedding soundtrack on-the-fly, reading your specific crowd in your specific room, that is the antidote to slop. It’s the opposite of a generated playlist or over-curated song choices. It’s a human being making a thousand small judgment calls because they care how your night feels.
The irony I’m comfortable sitting in: I’ll happily use AI to help me run the business, and I’ll refuse to let it touch the art. Those aren’t in conflict to me. One is a tool. The other is the whole point.
How I Use AI
So let me be concrete about where I land, because I don’t think the honest position is “AI good” or “AI bad.” It’s “AI for what, exactly.”
Where I use it: building tools and software, like the Claude-assisted work on Zenvents360 which if you are a client of mine you’ll be accessing the portal to help manage your event or if you are a peer of mine you could be accessing the business dashboard to manage everything about your business. Helping draft and sharpen my writing, where the ideas and the experience are mine and the tool just helps me get them out cleaner. Research and analysis. The behind-the-scenes business machinery where efficiency genuinely helps me serve clients better and frees me up to focus on the parts that matter.
Where I won’t use it: the actual creative and human core of what couples hire me for. I’m not handing your wedding soundtrack to an algorithm. I’m not generating fake art or fake announcements or a fake personality. I’m not outsourcing the relationship we build while planning your day. That’s not me being a purist for the sake of it. It’s me understanding what my clients are actually paying for, which is a person, present, making their once-in-a-lifetime day feel exactly right.
AI is the most powerful tool to come along in my professional lifetime, and I say that as someone who’s spent that lifetime around technology. Tools are wonderful. But a wedding isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a human one. And I intend to keep being the human in it.
If you want a wedding DJ who understands the technology cold and still insists on doing the irreplaceable parts by hand, let’s have a conversation.