ARTICLE
The following article is a reflection on the human condition. Its objective is to expose certain behavioral patterns that are common to most people, and how Deejaying may be a surprisingly adequate response to them. It focuses on the relationship between a generation-wide struggle to find mo- tivation and music, specifically deejaying, and its increasing popularity. It contains scientific facts, some history and a bit of conjecture. It’s meant to offer an opportunity to reflect on how we make decisions on our quest for happiness and to answer a simple question: why are there so many DJs around nowadays?
Whether you work in the industry or not, take a moment to think about how many people you have met over the past few years that told you they DJ, in some form or another. It definitely feels like most dance floors at underground parties have more DJs in them than regular party-goers.
Why is that? And what’s behind it? We could argue that there are three main aspects to deejaying that are particularly appealing to the human brain: finding new music (a.k.a. digging), performing for an audience and the sense of belonging to an affiliation group, often known as a “scene”. They may all relate to old evolutionary traits and a neurotransmitter that’s been receiving a lot of attention lately: dopamine.
Before going deeper
correlations, let’s take a step back and look at how access to music has evolved over the past few decades (if you’re familiar with this piece of recent history feel free to skip to the next paragraph). The evolution of formats from vinyl records and cassette tapes to CDs and eventually to MP3s have made it cheaper and more accessible for anyone to find new music. The real boom was during the Napster/LimeWire/eMule era. Those platforms made finding music as easy as looking something up on a web browser and, even more importantly, completely free to the consumer. Of course artists and labels lost millions in the process but consumers were given unprecedented access to a wealth of music, almost all of it actually. Music discovery had reached a new level. Burning CDs or ripping mixtapes grew connec- tions to the songs people identified with and made some of them more confident about their taste.
This was before streaming platforms changed the general public’s approach to music consumption, making it somewhat more passive for the average consumer. Furthermore, DJ equipment became massively more accessible than the clunky turnta- bles DJs had to start with in the 70s and 80s. Sure, some will say “real DJs play Vinyl” but the reality is that many artists today have started on a laptop + controller set up before eventually moving onto other gear… or not. Others have started on vin- yl and made the switch to digital for a variety of reasons, among which the obvious practical aspect of not having to sling a heavy bag of tunes around. It’s also true that in the past decade vinyl sales have reached all time highs, possibly as a precise reaction to the increased accessibility and as a sort of “underground gatekeeping” paradigm that follows the “vinyl only” mantra. The truth is that nowadays there are close to infinite options to play music from the widest range of devices that has ever been available to both amateurs and professionals, who can now pick whatever suits their style best.
into the neuro-chemical
Now that we’ve covered the accessibility topic, let’s look into the neurochemical side. First things first, what does dopamine actually do? Without getting into too much detail about the mechanics of how it acts on the brain (for that I recommend this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast), dopamine is the hormone responsible for our feeling of motivation and drive, and is an integral part of our brains’ reward system. It is not related to pleasure as many may think. Evolutionarily,
widest accepted theory goes that it motivated living beings to seek and forage for basic existential needs outside their bodies (food, shelter, sex etc.). It’s important to note that getting the reward itself does not release dopamine, as various studies have proven, but that it’s exclusively produced when moving towards something that we perceive as “good”.
As many of us know and experience daily, our reward systems have been somewhat abused by our contemporary lifestyles and technologies. Exces- sive food, smartphone use and other sources of overstimulation cause us to produce levels of dopamine so high our brains haven’t evolved to handle them yet. As a way to counter this phenomenon, our receptors go through a process called down-regulation, which means they become less sensitive to the same levels of dopamine, needing us to produce higher quantities in order to feel the same level of motivation and drive. This is a key concept that will be referenced again further ahead.
Some may go as far as saying that Zuck and the likes have “hijacked” these systems to keep us glued to our phones and increase their advertising revenue. Another popular narrative these days is that we constantly crave instant gratification because in our society we’re accustomed to having everything we want practically instantly. I’m not here to argue in favor of or against this, although, anecdotally, I have experienced surges in general levels of motivation after taking tech-detoxes, or even after just a couple of days of significantly reduced screen-time.
How does this relate to music? Well, if dopamine is released when we’re searching, seeking, foraging or otherwise expecting some kind of reward, how much of it do you think is produced when looking for new music? And what about that feeling of anticipation when you get that first gig in an actual club or festival? What about the first time you release a track or podcast? And when you get hundreds of people screaming your name? Even just the thought of all this might get you motivated, which means your brain is releasing dopamine just by imagining these experiences. However, there’s a bit of a catch. It turns out that our brains release the most dopamine when the outcome of the foraging attempt is unsure. Many experiments, including the famous rat experiment on addiction, have proven that if we repeat an action and get a positive outcome every time, we’ll eventually get bored and our brains will no longer produce as much dopamine for the same activity. However, if the outcome is only positive sometimes (50% approximately
for maximum dopamine
release), meaning expectations are not always met, we’ll be motivated to repeat that action basically ad infinitum. This is the basic neural mechanism behind addiction.
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