Peter Mac – From Barking Mad to House Music Legacy on the Virtual Sessions 10/29/25

Toronto-based producer and label owner Peter Mac shares his story of transformation from a live event promoter to an acclaimed figure in soulful and deep house. When the pandemic hit in 2020 and his events agency came to a halt, Peter used the time to learn music production from scratch, watching hundreds of tutorials and applying his background in musical theory to his new craft. His passion led to releases across multiple labels, culminating in the creation of his own imprint, Barking Mad Music.

 

The label, inspired by Peter’s love for deep and Latin house, showcases both his own tracks and collaborations with emerging artists, particularly from Mexico. His dedication to high-quality house music reflects a lifelong love for the genre’s roots, from Chicago’s 90s era to its current global resurgence. Peter recounts promoting early house legends such as Frankie Knuckles, David Morales, and Carl Cox, describing the thrill of helping shape dance culture during its formative years in Europe.

 

The discussion dives deep into the modern state of the music industry, exploring social media burnout, inflated egos, and how commercialism has diluted artistic authenticity. Peter and Darran agree that while technology has transformed accessibility, it has also diminished attention spans and organic connection on the dance floor. Despite these challenges, Peter remains optimistic that true house music endures through its passion-driven community.

 

He closes with a heartfelt message to fans: seek quality music, dig deeper, and reconnect with the underground roots that made dance culture so powerful in the first place.

 

Topics

0:12 – Growing up in Toronto and launching Barking Mad Music
2:49 – From event promoter to music producer during lockdown
5:12 – Building a label and working with Latin and soulful house artists
7:53 – The golden era of house and early collaborations with legends
10:54 – Industry egos, online negativity, and creative competition
17:26 – The impact of money, EDM culture, and authenticity in music
19:42 – Cell phone bans and restoring real dance floor energy
25:57 – Technology, social media burnout, and shrinking attention spans
35:29 – Collaborating with Quantize and DJ Spen on new soulful releases
55:25 – The underground’s future and preserving house music’s legacy

Connect with Peter Mac

Instagram: @petermacofficial

[Darran]
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the DJ Sessions Presents the Virtual Sessions. I’m your host, Darran, and right now I’m sitting in the studios, the live streaming studios in Seattle, Washington, and coming to me today from Toronto, Canada, we have Peter Mac on the show. Peter, how’s it going today?

[Peter Mac]
Darran, how are you?

[Darran]
I’m doing great.

[Peter Mac]
First of all, I want to send my condolences. I don’t know if Seattle is recovered from what happened in the baseball and the American Championship Series, but hey, we’re in the World Series versus the Dodgers, and we had to get by Seattle first, and I’m really sorry, man.

[Darran]
Oh man, it was a hell of a series. I mean, I’m not the, if I had to choose to watch sporting events, you know, I’m not a huge baseball fan, like a regular season watcher, but watching them make it that far, I mean, we go to games all the time. The games are fun.

[Peter Mac]
We went to game seven, and I mean, they played amazing. Not as good as Toronto, of course, but they played amazing, Seattle.

[Darran]
Yeah, I mean, it was just like, just to have it elevated, the energy in the city and everything that was going on is awesome, and we got, we had some good contending sports teams here, football and baseball. That’s a great sporting city, yeah. Yeah, we need to get our basketball team back, I think.

[Peter Mac]
And you got the Kraken now.

[Darran]
The Kraken NHL, yeah, they’re pretty awesome.

[Peter Mac]
Of course, being Canadian, obviously very important to us.

[Darran]
And that stadium too, that revamp on that stadium, Climate Pledge Arena, which used to be Key Arena that I grew up with, it’s a beautiful stadium. I mean, very, very awesome. Been to a lot of concerts and games there as well.

[Peter Mac]
I remember the Kingdome.

[Darran]
Oh yeah, the Kingdome, I kind of grew up in the Kingdome. I mean, that was a fun concrete floor that they played on. I don’t know how those football players took it, because all they did is they laid down the green stuff, you know, the belt.

It wasn’t a grass stadium.

[Peter Mac]
Well, we have a covered stadium as well, the Rogers Centre, but it’s only used for baseball.

[Darran]
Yeah, so, but we could talk sports all day long.

[Peter Mac]
We could talk about music.

[Darran]
Let’s get back to the music here on the DJ Sessions. You run a label called Barking Mad Music. Now, wait a second, I’m going to actually pull up an email really quick here, because in this email with you, I’m a little confused, so I want some clarification on this.

I see in your email signature, it says Peter Mac, music producer, and it lists Barking Mad. Okay, we’ll talk about Barking Mad, but then I see Quantize Recordings, Category One, Soul & Pepper, N-Word, Groove Boom, Katel, Plastic…

[Peter Mac]
I know. I mean, it’s going… Well, I started, I’ll tell you how I got into this whole production thing.

I had my own events agency and booking agency for about 10 years before 19… 1920. That’s going a bit too far.

2020. And then COVID hit, and my events went from here to zero. I had nothing to do.

And I was sitting there going, what am I going to do with myself? And I said to myself, I’ve always wanted to produce electronic music, house music. So what did I do?

I sat and watched about 300 tutorials of YouTube on how to… Because I’m not a technical guy, I’m a musical guy. I have musical training in university, and with technical stuff, I was having trouble just organizing and getting you on today.

I’m just not a technical guy, but I learned how to do it. And I really, really worked hard at it. And once you learn all the buttons work and all the technical stuff, it came really easy for me.

And I’ve been producing… That was before Barking Mad. So I started producing music for about two years from 2020 to 2022.

And I sent my music to all these labels. And about 80% of the time, the labels took all the demos, they sent them. So that’s how I built up a big base of different labels that I was working on.

In 2022, I opened Barking Bad Music, and I started distributing my own… I said Barking Bad, Barking Mad. That’s actually how I got the name of the label, sort of.

But I’m a big Breaking Bad fan. So there was that connection somehow.

[Darran]
Nice. Now, I see the icon. It’s Barking Mad.

Is there a mascot, a pet in the studio?

[Peter Mac]
I don’t know. I was lying in bed one night thinking, what am I going to call the label? And I just came to…

I was talking to some English producer the other day, and we were talking about a DJ. And he said, this guy’s Barking Mad. So I just thought, wow, it just stuck with me.

And that’s how I got the name of the label. I think most labels come… the ideas of labels come out in some weird way, in that way.

[Darran]
Back in 2022, we were toying around with the idea of opening up or starting our own label at the DJ sessions. And I looked at that endeavor. Where things were going, it was going to be a feasible thing to do.

But the one thing that was so hard was, okay, what are we going to be known for? What is our style going to be known for? Are we going to open it to our artists?

Are we going to use only our own artists? How does that look like if we blow up an artist and put a bunch of money into them and blow them up? And then they walk away, and we just made them famous.

But now they’re just riding off the fame that we helped them get. We don’t get a kickback up for anything in the future, unless we’re signing on to a deal or something like that. Things kind of went down in 2023, 2024.

I had to put some things on the side burner. But I just saw that almost… I don’t have the time to listen to 300, 500, 1000 submissions a day.

If you open up the floodgates like that, how do you manage that if it’s just your own label? Is your own label just for you?

[Peter Mac]
I mean, the majority of the tracks are my tracks. But every third release, fourth release, I put another artist on the label. And I have some favorites, of course.

I like working with the Mexican producers because they’re putting out a lot of great Latin house stuff. And just a little bit about the label. I started primarily as a real deep house label.

And then now I’ve expanded to soulful house and Latin house. And so it’s basically the three genres that I really love. Myself, personally, and what I like to DJ.

Actually, DJing, that’s not true. DJing, I really love deep house music. I love it.

That’s my genre.

[Darran]
That’s… house music is my go-to. It’s kind of, you could say, what I was raised on in the electronic music underground culture growing up.

I mean, you put a good house beat on, whether it’s in the afternoon, at the beach, in the nightclub, even at a restaurant, eating dinner. It’s like, I’m in the mood.

[Peter Mac]
It’s not like hands in the air type of music.

[Darran]
Yeah. But it definitely is getting on the floor, booty shaking and moving. And the soulfulness of house as well, of the lyrics that get…

I love the guitars, I love the horns that they put in there, and the lyrics. I was describing years back, you probably know the track. I can’t remember it off the top of my head, but I had this whole house music compilation.

It wasn’t a disc, it was just like somebody spun the whole thing and put it together. And the way it starts out, I go, you want to know what house music is? Listen to this.

[Peter Mac]
You know, the stuff from Chicago in the 90s, I think personally, the golden, and I’m showing my age here maybe, but the golden age of house music for me was the 90s. Yeah. Not the 1890s.

That’s going a bit too far back. 1990s. I really believe that.

But, you know, I lived in Spain when that whole thing was happening and I was a promoter and I was lucky enough, working as a promoter, that we brought some of the big American house DJs over to mainland Spain. Not Ibiza, because Ibiza, they’ve been, they were bringing them since the 80s. But we brought Frankie Knuckles, who passed a couple years ago.

We brought David Morales, we brought Carl Cox. We brought a lot of house DJs that were popular in the UK, but weren’t popular yet in mainland Europe. And we started promoting parties with those type of DJs.

And it really took off. Probably because in the coast in Spain, they had a lot of English tourists. So that helped a lot, how everything grew.

But it’s fascinating how house music started from some warehouse in Chicago, and now it’s like a global phenomenon. Really.

[Darran]
It’s funny you mentioned David Morales, because his name just came up in an interview I did previous to this one today. And I was like, wait a second, I think I’ve had David on the show before. And I typed in Dave on my website, I was doing a search while I was in the middle of the interview, and it didn’t come up.

And then I typed in David. And sure enough, I did have him on the show in 2022. And I was like, I thought I had David on the show.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah, he’s one of the fathers of house music, especially American sounding house.

[Darran]
Yeah, yeah, very fun interview. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever had an unpleasant interview with anyone on the show. And I know we were doing a little talking before the show that the ego, the industry, I’ll try, I’ll try to tamp it down.

Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. I mean, like I said, before the show, there’s only a few things you can’t do or things I won’t discuss on the show.

But, you know, that is one of the things that I’ve encountered as I was telling you pre show, I just had actually had three encounters. This is so crazy. It’s on that subject.

I’ve had three encounters in the last month with a very big name in the industry. Very big. I mean, big, big, big, big name.

And it was kind of had an EU moment, like, what the hell, dude. And then another person locally. It was and I told them a new a hole.

Like I said, Oh, you want to play Facebook war with me did let me throw a thesis on you for asking such a stupid question. You know, I was like, I mean, basically, I can’t name the name. And my Facebook is kind of friends only.

I got 33,000 people there, whatever. But the point is, I came back and the person was attacking me for like the way I post online.

[Peter Mac]
And I was I don’t understand how people have such energy for doing negative things like that. It’s negative energy.

[Darran]
Yeah. And it was kind of like, it was an attack on my style of posting. But I learned after 2020, that I used to give away 98% of my information away for free to help in but in to lift up the community, I didn’t ever.

Because anything I could do, you could find out how to do it online. I mean, it wasn’t a secret. But a lot of people in 2020 were knocking on my door, asking me, how do I do this?

How do I do this? How do I do this?

[Peter Mac]
No one could leave their house.

[Darran]
Yeah. And I’m kind of sitting there going, okay, I’ll help you out. I’ll help you out and help you out.

But what I found out I was helping everyone out to in a sense, make them my competition. You know, and it’s like, you never panty didn’t happen. You would never put yourself on camera and live stream at all.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah.

[Darran]
And here you go. You don’t want to work with the guy that’s been doing it. You want to take his information and go and like, finally, I dropped it down.

I give 97% of my information away for free now. You know, that 1% can be a crucial part to any any piece of the puzzle. But yeah, this person comes online and hits me up like that.

I’m like, I do. I’m very famous or not famous, but I’m known for vague booking. If you know the term, because I know that when I put stuff out there, the ideas I’m putting out there, I want to be the first one to have.

I’m not going to post the ingredients of my recipe. I’m going to say I’m making cupcakes, but I’m not going to tell you what’s going into the ingredients of the cupcakes. Why do you always post about cupcakes, but you don’t put the ingredients of your cupcakes online?

First of all, Facebook, I can do what I want. That was the first rule. Second, there are no rules to social media, you know?

And I mean, I just laid into like, that can be a good thing.

[Peter Mac]
That can be a bad thing.

[Darran]
Yeah. And I was like, cool. But then again, locally here, I had somebody, I literally, somebody commented on a post I made and they said, is it going to be this location?

And all I put on there was simple, N-O, smiley face. That’s all I put. There was no other context outside of that that could have led or read into that.

Nope, smiley. I literally say no smiley face, like, nope, good guess, but no. This person comes back, literally might DMs and goes, first three letters, WTF.

How can you actually joke about a business going out of business? I’m like, what the, what are you even talking about, dude? I simply said no smiley face and you’re reading it this whole way and then coming at me sideways based on context.

And I know we’re getting a little off tangent here, but I’m like, who the, I went off on it. I started all caps, this person, like you’re the reason why Seattle is dying because of this kind of crap and this kind of egotistical bullshit. And you didn’t even ask me.

And then he tries to backpedal and says, why are you so angry? Dude, I’m responding in kind to your stupidity. You know, I’m sorry, but I don’t have a threat.

I don’t, you’re not going to come at me sideways. I got, when I know even the person who saw that, when I repost about it, he goes, dude, I didn’t interpret your comment like that at all. And I’m a very trivial kind of guy.

Anyways, that ego.

[Peter Mac]
I think that’s a whole thing of being paranoid, you know, sense of entitlement. There’s a lot, the entertainment industry is a messy place. Let’s be honest.

I love, you know, I love the music. I love making the music. You know, I’m not a person who’s on Twitch all the time.

I’m more in the background, except when I’m DJing, which I love, but that’s in front of a live crowd. You know, that’s a different thing. But to be honest, there’s a lot of like, it’s a sleazy business.

Let’s be honest. If we’re going to be honest, let’s be honest. And there’s a lot of sleazy people.

There’s a lot of great people. There’s a lot of amazing people, but there’s a lot of sleazy cutthroat people in the business. It’s just the way the business is.

I think any art business, you know, movie business, you know, fashion business. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s just the way it is. You know, any art form business is going to have a lot of trashy things happening.

[Darran]
Exactly. You know, and it’s just unfortunate because I tend to believe to live in a positive mental influence kind of environment. I do put everything down on paper, though.

I’m very contractual. People want to be a resident DJ with our show. There’s six contracts they got to sign before they come on.

And most of them, they don’t know the industry. It’s there to protect them and protect me from any sleaziness. So I don’t get branded for being sleazy.

Some people, they don’t get it and they think, oh, he’s trying to have me sign contracts like he must be sleazy. Like, isn’t that how professionals do it?

[Peter Mac]
Exactly.

[Darran]
Yeah. That’s right.

[Peter Mac]
I mean, I’m on the other side of the business on the business side and we got everything.

[Darran]
We don’t do anything without nothing to handshake anymore, you know, and that’s where the sleaziness where it can slide down a slippery slope. And then people say, well, you told me it was going to be big. Well, what’s your.

[Peter Mac]
Well, another thing I want to touch on is, you know, house music started as house music in Chicago and slowly grew. And then the English started getting into it. And then techno started in Detroit and became popular in Germany.

And it’s it’s been on a line like this, the popularity and the money and the money is becoming crazy. DJs are getting insane amounts of money. And when the money equation enters it, big money equation, big assholes enter this equation as well.

So the state of the the the business right now, my personal view, you know, the whole EDM thing. I mean, the music’s not good. It’s all visuals.

It’s all hands in the air. That’s not, you know, the real, you know, the organic producers. They don’t want to see it go that way.

But again, when money gets involved, big money, the corporate guys get in. It has happened to the movie industry with all the superhero movies. There’s, you know, the Martin Scorsese’s and the Paul Thomas Anderson’s are on one hand, you know.

But, you know, there’s all the superhero movies. And it’s the same in electronic music. Ninety percent of the music’s crap.

Sorry. That’s the way I feel. But the temper, there’s a lot of great music coming out still.

And that stuff tends to be ignored by the mass public, unfortunately. And it happens in every entertainment art form.

[Darran]
Yeah.

[Peter Mac]
You know, it’s it is what it is.

[Darran]
And that’s one of the founding reasons that we started the DJ session so many years ago was to basically feature the artists that were maybe more underground, local, but get them out to the world, literally via live streaming, via podcast and show them off, show the talent off that was going on. But, you know, coupling that with some eye candy, obviously, as I was telling you before the show, you know, when I first had that big name artist come play on our show, I kind of went ding, ding, ding, light bulb. Maybe I should set it asking just for interviews.

Maybe I could have him come by and play sets, too, and then kind of co-mix that. But our founding mission will always be to help out the not necessarily the underdog. I don’t call I don’t think of as an underdog, just the artists that maybe don’t have it within their rapport or their Rolodex or the connections of the money to propel them to how many Instagram followers they have.

Yeah, there you go. There’s a big one, too. You know, that’s another big one.

I had an artist DJ come to me recently. He’s like, well, the reason why I’m going to come on the show and I should be on your show is because every time I play, I play in a different mix. And I was like, as opposed to what, playing the same thing every time?

[Peter Mac]
Yeah, you know, you get a lot of fringe people coming into the business because there’s so much money, potential money involved. So you don’t get the really diehard, you know, house heads. You get a lot of people in it for the buck.

Let’s be honest. I mean, I totally respect, you know, female DJs. There’s some amazing female DJs out there, but there’s a lot of them just propped up there with their pre-mix sets and they just they look good.

And it’s all visual thing. You know, people aren’t even listening to the music because they have they’re too busy filming the person. You know, you go to a gig, some of these EDM gigs, no one’s dancing anymore.

They’re just filming. It’s crazy. Yep.

[Darran]
I’m very aware of that. It’s insane. It’s been a topic I bring up at every show and I’m getting ready.

I have my contract out to a venue space here in Seattle, holds about 350 people. And hint, hint, one of the things we’re going to be doing is no cell phone use in the entire venue.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah, I think that’s an amazing policy. It’s destroyed the dance floor.

[Darran]
Yeah. I was in Berlin last year, went to a club, walked to the door. Nice bouncers, nice security guards.

They’re like, okay, your phone. Handed my phone. I go, sticker, sticker.

And I went, this is cool. It’s amazing. I mean, I do video for a living.

It’s the last thing I want to be doing.

[Peter Mac]
It’s the biggest vibe killer on a dance floor.

[Darran]
It is. It is. And I think more nightclubs are going to start doing it as it catches on.

[Peter Mac]
I think people are getting social media burnout.

[Darran]
If I had the bandwidth to start up a new 501c3 nonprofit, worldwide nonprofit would be a coalition of going out and knocking on the doors of nightclubs saying, sign this for banning cell phone use in clubs and get people sign on board and have cities and nightclubs events. Because the thing is, is a lot of people will say, and it’s not because I’m in threat or fear of my job being taken away because I’m a media professional and why have media come backstage if we have 50,000 people on their cell phones filming and sharing on the social media for free. But from the artist’s perspective, from the vibe perspective of being into the show and capturing that, I mean, there’s a saying that I say every 4th of July, or I’ve seen it comes up every 4th of July on social media.

No one’s going to watch that fireworks show that you just put on your phone. They’re not. Now, if it’s a badass drone show, okay, I get that.

That’s cool. But fireworks, you’re not going to sit there and just go.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah. Darran, you’re preaching to the choir.

[Darran]
I know. I know I am. I know I am.

So I mean, I would like to start a coalition and go around even into Seattle and say, hey, venue, event space, you got to understand the performers feed off of that energy. And if you’re allowing people in there with a cell phone to do this and then go to this, this and go to this, well, here’s the thing. They’re recording on your premises.

You don’t have to give them a right to record. One. Two, the artist’s work is copywritten.

Okay. Three, they don’t have a license to distribute that music and put it up online. Technically, they should be getting copyright flags all over the place for doing it.

But four, if they’re spending this much time, if you take the average person and they’re spending 15 to 30 minutes of their total time or a quarter of their time or, you know, 15, 10% of their time doing that, they’re not in line buying drinks and that’s how you make money.

[Peter Mac]
Buy a drink, dance, talk with your friends, have a good time.

[Darran]
Have a good time.

[Peter Mac]
For me, give me a 300 capacity venue in a basement with one strobe light, but with a booming sound system, I’m in heaven.

[Darran]
Yeah. Yep.

[Peter Mac]
And that’s exactly what I thought anymore. And 90% of the cases, it’s just a visual spectacle, all the bells and whistles. And I think they would almost Disney world now.

[Darran]
Yeah. The, the thing is, is I think they would literally, they would be scared just like the, they didn’t want me bringing my video camera in the clubs when I was younger. Cause they, I would get this feedback.

Well, if you show people on TV, what it’s like in the club, they’re not going to want to come here. It’s a 22 and a half minute show on broadcast television that airs once and goes away. If anything, I’m giving you a 30 minute infomercial about why people should be coming down here.

It was so bass, backwards. And the thought now bass, backwards thought is, Oh, if we don’t let cell phones come into our club, then people are going to hate it. And they’re not going to want to come here.

And they’re like, well, you know, that’s not the way to think that’s backwards. Yeah. Backwards thinking.

So, and the other fourth reason is because the thing is we’re going to be live streaming everything we do at our night. So if you want a really well-produced version of the show, you want to share it with your friends, tell them to go watch it in pay-per-view online. If they’re from around the world and give us a little scrilla back for us putting on our production and then we can also pay the artists as well.

And in proceeds of that whole pay-per-view system can go into play. And I mean, I’m corded yet. Most people aren’t set up to do that.

I mean, that’s a whole nother production in itself, but that being said, it’s like share and have fun with your friends. Then you can go back and include it in your ticket price. You’ll be able to go back and watch that performance for a limited amount of time or for ever have the rights to do that and go, wow, that was such an amazing night.

I got it right here on my desktop, or I got it in my phone and I can play it back in my car. And it isn’t some crappy recording from my phone that nobody’s ever going to see. Nobody’s ever going to watch and call it a day.

I can go on and on about that subject.

[Peter Mac]
I mean, yeah.

[Darran]
The stuff posted on Instagram is like, you know, another, another thing waving their hands in the It’d be so far and few between because it would take the venue to enact it and not because the venues have so many promoters inside the venues. This promoter says, Hey, come to, I can see even see the backlash of people saying, Hey, come to our place. We don’t care if you use a cell phone at our place.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah. It’s we’re victims to technology and the advance of technology. We are thinking that the iPhone would be such a great addition to society, but you’re having mental health issues from fit.

I have a 15 year old. You don’t know. You know, he spends a lot of time on the phone, but all his friends do as well.

And I’m trying to tell them, but it’s like speaking to a brick wall. They’re so indoctrinated now into watching YouTube videos and whatever Instagram it’s almost, it’s almost, uh, we’re, we’re defeating or defeat. We’re trying to defeat something that we can’t defeat.

You know, it’s so powerful and they’re getting their dopamine kick every five seconds with, with new tick talk video. It’s crazy. And this is the same thing with, um, going to dance, uh, to these big festivals, the kids, uh, you know, the younger clubbers, they want their dopamine fix with the big, you know, drum roll and the big, uh, break and everything.

And it all sounds the same. They’re there. They don’t have the attention span anymore to actually listen to a whole track and, and, and enjoy the track.

I remember when I was young, I used to go down to the record store and buy my favorite new album. Look at the line, leaner notes, you know, and listen to the whole album over and over again and examine the music. People don’t do that anymore.

Who does that? It’s crazy. It’s just like this dopamine kick.

They need every day. Their attention span has disappeared.

[Darran]
I know I sound like an old person, but I know they say the track length have gone down. I mean, I had a DJ play on our show the other day and I looked at, they sent me the set list. I had two other DJs play after him and he sent me a track list, 12 tracks for an hour.

That’s about right. Three, three and a half minutes. Okay, cool.

The other DJs 31, 36 tracks in an hour. I’m like, that sounds exhausting.

[Peter Mac]
It sounds like I get ear cancer.

[Darran]
It sounded great. I’d not knock it. I’d love the song.

I’d love the selection, but I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t, I listening, not watching the decks, not watching them switch out. Cause I’m driving my mobile studio.

I thought it was just one big, you know, it could have been a song and that’s how the song went. I wasn’t really paying attention because I’m driving, but looking back and I’m going, they put 36 tracks to a one hour set. Okay.

[Peter Mac]
You know, a, a, a mixed session is a journey. It’s not going on a Stairmaster for an hour and just like, it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to the ear.

You can’t, you can’t, uh, spiritually connect with music that way. It’s impossible.

[Darran]
You mentioned something a few moments ago about going to the record store and picking out your record and reading the notes and all that.

[Peter Mac]
Wonderful ritual.

[Darran]
Do you remember the first record you ever bought as in your DJ career? Not as a person, not as a kid going to Yeah, going back.

[Peter Mac]
It was probably a kiss album or Alice Cooper, something like that. You know, it’s probably a funk record. I can’t, I’m trying to think now you’ve put me on the spot because, you know, I’ll tell you, I love so many different genres of music.

I listened to jazz. It’s probably a jazz record. I studied jazz.

I went to Berkeley college of music in, in Boston and I’m a trained saxophone player and that’s where I got my music experience from. So I would say, you know, um, maybe, uh, I don’t know if you remember the band returned to forever. They were a jazz fusion band from the seventies, Stanley Clark, George Duke.

Yeah. It was that type of thing that I really, you know, and that, that, I mean, house music has all those jazz influences in it, you know, and it’s all connected. All this music.

It’s amazing. If people actually had the patience to actually analyze how house music started, it’s a very fascinating genre because it has, it has a lot of disco influences, jazz influences, and it’s all connected by a really great kick, you know, and amazing things come from that. And that’s the beauty of house music, you know, good house music.

[Darran]
And you started producing, as you mentioned earlier, uh, you know, back in 2020, you know, how, how many tracks do you produce in a month and how many end up being released on average?

[Peter Mac]
Well, at the beginning I was like, it was like all this creativity was coming out of me. Like a volcano was releasing tracks every week. It was crazy.

But then I realized I have, instead of a quantity, you want to pull a quality. So I’ve really started to concentrate on that and actually, you know, release once a month, maybe two, you know, three tracks in two months. But, um, when you start producing, you make a lot of mistakes, you learn during the process, like anything, you know, and you learn from your mistakes.

And I hope I’m fine tuning my art along the way. And I think that’s the goal that every producer has is fine tuning your art from making mistakes.

[Darran]
And what software did you decide upon using?

[Peter Mac]
Reason?

[Darran]
Yeah.

[Peter Mac]
There was a DJ, a friend of mine, producer Funk Devoid. I don’t know if you ever heard of him. He’s from Barcelona.

He’s on Twitch all the time. I, I, I asked him, I sent him an email. I said, you know, I, I’m going to start producing.

And I knew him from Spain because I used to do bookings and clubs with him. And I just reached out to him and I actually was on, he, he was doing a lot of Twitch broadcasts. I think he’s still doing it.

I haven’t talked to him in ages, but I asked him, I said, he actually gave me some really great points about producing actually. So he, I asked him, you know, what’s the best software to use. And he says, if you’d like old school, which I do like old school, you should get Reason because they, I don’t know if, you know, Reason software, it’s a Swedish software propeller heads.

They use that old rack style of all the plugins on the software. And I saw that and I was like, okay, I’m going to try this one. And it was just like that.

That’s the decision I made. It was like some random stupid Reason like that. And I haven’t moved from it.

I’ve stuck to it. I don’t use any of the other popular ones like Logic or I’m sure they’re great. I’m sure amazing, but I love my Reason.

I’m plugging you guys if you’re listening.

[Darran]
Well, you know, producing music, it does stand synonymous with spending countless hours behind the computer screen, sculpting your beats. Where do you find your free time to stay fit?

[Peter Mac]
Oh man, I have a treadmill right next to my, in my studio. Okay. I go on the treadmill an hour a day and I have my other business that I do.

But I do spend a lot of time in the studio more than my wife says I should. And my son as well. But hey, I mean, we’re addicted to it.

We’re addicted to making music. The real producers, I can name tons of producers, you know, if you go on track source, those guys are putting out a lot of tracks. I know for a fact, they spend a lot of hours in the studio doing what they do.

But I do, you asked how, if I stay fit, I have a treadmill in my studio.

[Darran]
Yeah. I mean, I have to, I have a VR workout program that I do now try to do. Cause otherwise I get in this chair, I’m stuck in this chair from 637 AM till 5 PM.

And over the last three months, I got over the last few months.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah. Watch out for the hemorrhoids, man.

[Darran]
I know I’m, I got a nice chair there, but my belly has increased by 30 pounds.

[Peter Mac]
It’s crazy. It’s like, it’s addictive. It’s really in a good way, I think, but it’s, it’s very addictive being creative.

You know, you talk to creative people like, artists and, you know, screenwriters, they have to create or they get depressed. They’re, they’re the, there’s something in their brain that if they don’t get their creative, you know, creativity out, they become, it’s like a dopamine thing. And they go, they get really depressed.

I really believe in that. There’s something in your, in your DNA, creative people that you really do have to create and you feel normal. It’s almost like shooting heroin.

You know, they say heroin addicts feel normal after they shoot heroin. It’s the same thing for creative people that once they get that what’s inside them out, they feel much better about themselves and their wellbeing. It’s a crazy thing.

I think it’s something that should be really, you know, analyzed more by psychologists. It’s a fascinating thing about creative people.

[Darran]
Well, you know, it’s, it’s very, there’s always something going on over here at the DJ sessions and I have my own team can hardly keep up. It was just the other day that I realized that I’m, I do a lot of stuff, but I also have a team of like, this is outside of my crew. Um, the DJs that play on the show that I have about 14 different people that do different things, whether it’s app development, web development, you know, live streaming, paywall development, um, unit PR, you know, all that fun stuff that it takes a team to build all this stuff.

[Peter Mac]
It’s crazy. You know, I’m, you know, I spent so much time making music. I try to, you know, pick myself, you know, I have a release coming up.

I have to do the social media. I have to do this. I have to do, you know, I have to talk to people.

It’s crazy. It takes up so much of your time, but it’s, it’s in this day and age, it’s necessary. Cause I, you know, the main thing for me is I want to get my music out.

I want people to listen to my music, you know, what I’ve done. I think every artist is the same. Even if they say they, they don’t want that.

It’s you want people, the reason you create is for yourself, but it’s for making other people happy. And when you, you get a, I get a message on, you know, on Instagram saying, I love your music.

[Darran]
That makes me feel so good, you know, but they’re actually liking the music that I put so much effort in, you know, well, that’s, I mean, it’s always great to get positive accolades or people tell you you’re doing a good job or that, you know, one of them, I love when somebody sits down and goes, that was an awesome interview. I’m like, thank you. Cool.

You know, or, or, you know, I had somebody, the gentleman I was interviewing today, he went and watched the interview I just did with Martin Jensen. And it’s a funny thing because I asked him a question and he goes, you asked Martin Jensen that same question last week.

[Peter Mac]
And I went, shit. I mean, you know, I think the fact that people are like all the work that you’re putting into something in, in whatever you’re doing, you know, a screenwriter writing a movie or anything that’s, that’s a big hit on you. Not just ego.

I’m just the whole creative process.

[Darran]
Yeah. You know, speaking of creative processes, you just released something with quantize.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah. So it’s all about that. Wow.

That’s, that’s a biggie. I’ve been a big, big fan of DJ spent for years. He’s the godfather of soulful house, in my opinion.

And I got together, I always wanted to do a track with this amazing singer from South Africa. His name’s Earl W. Green.

I swear to God, you would think this guy’s from Chicago, but he’s from Johannesburg. And he has such a soulful American voice. I heard some of his music and I couldn’t believe it.

This guy’s from South Africa. I mean, guys, check out, you can find it on, on track source, the track. This guy has a more soulful American voice than like half the soulful singers in the States.

It’s amazing. So I just wanted to work with him and I sent him a message, you know, I think on, on messenger and he answered me and said, yeah, let’s do a track. Send me the music.

So I worked on the music for a couple of weeks, sent him something and he killed it. He put on some vocal tracks on there were just amazing. And I finished up the track.

I put all his mixed, edited the vocals, fixed it up, arranged it. And I said, okay, I think this is the track I’m going to send to spend. So I sent it to spend and he replied immediately said, this, this is hot, man.

I’d love to sign this. And so that’s how it began. And they’ve just finished doing a remix of the track.

I don’t know if you know, the, the producer by in LA real soul. Sounds familiar. Yeah.

And spend did the remix with a real soul and they did this amazing remix. And it’s already in the pre-order charts at the top of track source right now. So, and it’s coming out on Friday, plug I’m plugging, I’m plugging that plug away.

And I hope you guys, whoever’s listening, should listen to it. Cause it’s a quite a, it’s quite a piece of music.

[Darran]
I’m definitely, I would put that on my to-do list because I am a huge house music fan myself.

[Peter Mac]
And I love quantize spends label is like the, his royalty of soulful house, you know, amazing, amazing label.

[Darran]
Do you ever get fed up with making and playing music?

[Peter Mac]
And interesting question. Yeah. You go through phases, you get burnout.

I mean, anyone that’s burned out sitting in front of a computer for 12 hours straight or doing it continuously day by day, you go through, you do like, I’ll do like two or three tracks. Okay. I have to stop for like a week.

And you usually stop for like three or four days, you know, I’ll say a week and then like three or four days like, Oh, okay. And then I start, I go back to, I go back to composing again, but you do get burnout for sure. You can’t, we’re not machines, you know, we’re not AI.

I mean, I’m not AI. There is some AI music out there, but that’s another, that’s, that’s another show, right? But you do have to, you can’t, you can’t continuously be creative and make music.

[Darran]
You go through these phases where you have to take a break, you know? Absolutely. I just, like, I think I mentioned to you, I took an eight and a half month hiatus from like basically late August last year till May of this year.

I had no front facing operations. Like people were like, where the heck did Darran go?

[Peter Mac]
I think it’s great though. It really rejuvenates you and cleanses you of all the, all the stuff you went through. Yeah.

I think it’s a healthy thing to do. I mean, again, we’re not machines.

[Darran]
Yeah. And because of that, I have propelled the DJ sessions into a place that it should have been in that was going to be in 2020 until everyone jumped on the line and started doing the same thing in a sense of things. And then even in 2022, I made, I made some decisions that kind of put things on hold and slowed the whole process down again.

Now coming back to the table five years later, or even doing this six for 16 years, I’m now positioned to, I don’t want to say be more commercial, no sellout, but the partnerships we’ve forged like with MN2S, you know, it’s very awesome. We’re super excited to be working with the team over there, the label services team.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah, they’re great. I, I actually, they’re my distributor for my label and they do an amazing job. They have really good hookup with Spotify, with Beatport, with Tracksource.

They really make an effort to get your music featured on the front line, which is very important because a lot of producers, they just do everything themselves and you really need that push from a distributor. It really helps a lot.

[Darran]
Well, and you know, I had forwarded one of our artists who’s looking for representation, more booking representation than music representation, but still he can’t really crack that nut yet. And then Seattle isn’t the biggest music market to have the movers and shakers.

[Peter Mac]
It’s really tough nowadays because everyone and his grandmother wants to be a DJ, but 90% of people shouldn’t even consider being a DJ because they just don’t have the goods for it.

[Darran]
Well, it’s funny you bring that up. Everyone wants to be a DJ now. I just put a post on Facebook a few days ago saying, if the original connotation of DJ was disc jockey, because discs stood for record, what do the DJs, what should it be called today?

And the thought I said was, should it be called a digital jockey? Because everything is, if you’re not playing vinyl, then you’re a disc jockey. If you’re a digital jockey, you’re still using the moniker DJ, but you’re not necessarily a content creator.

You’re not creating the music that you’re playing. Neither was the person with the albums, but they still had to go source their music. They had to go to the store or have it delivered as a pack.

[Peter Mac]
It was a whole art form.

[Darran]
Yeah. It was so limited.

[Peter Mac]
If an album only had 10,000 pressings or 50,000 pressings or 5,000 pressings and only a hundred of those made them to America, but it was a radio station, back in the day, there was these record stores in Toronto and every Thursday, the owners would have to go to Buffalo on Thursday afternoon to get all the new U.S. house music from New York and Chicago and Detroit. They would bring it back and there’d be like a hundred DJs waiting at the stores, waiting for those. And it would go out right away.

All the music would disappear within an hour. And that’s how DJs used to get their music. Now there’s like thousands of websites you can download music.

I mean, there’s a couple of great ones that I only use, but I mean, it’s crazy. Now the access to the music is so easy that all the music should be amazing in the clubs, but it’s not. A lot of it’s crappy.

I come again to the people who shouldn’t be in the industry.

[Darran]
And I saw the other day, the barrier to entry being so low with equipment being easy to acquire, music being easy to acquire, the training is everywhere on YouTube. I mean, you trained yourself to be a producer by YouTube videos. I’ve never trained to be a DJ.

People say, I’d be pretty good at it. I’m like, I’m an executive producer. Let me focus on contracts and getting things done over here and raising money for everything we do.

You all play the music, you stick to that. I saw the other day when I was looking this up, I go, there was a two-year-old that started, he started playing vinyl at two years old. Wow.

I think he’s nine now. He just headlined at ADE. And they’re like, you got to watch this.

I can’t remember off the top of my head. I heard about it. Yeah, but that’s crazy.

Give me a second here. Kid DJ.

[Peter Mac]
Well, that’s a real, I mean, that’s a phenomenal.

[Darran]
Not Kid ADE. That’s DJ Lex. Who is the DJ?

[Peter Mac]
What type of house is he playing?

[Darran]
I don’t know if it’s house music or I think it might be Star Trek. No. Gosh.

Star Trek music. Yeah, Star Trek. I can’t remember the kid’s name, but I saw it and I go, you want to be a DJ in this business now?

Okay, that’s great. But now that everyone can do it, what sets you apart? Exactly.

And if anyone can pick it up and a two-year-old can pick it up. Okay, great. Are you producing your own tracks?

And is that going to be the way? And you mentioned it earlier, just because you have a hundred thousand Instagram followers and you’re a DJ. Well, I know people that can go out there and get a hundred thousand Instagram followers and DJ as well.

What makes you different? And for me, being a producer of a show, I’ll look and say, how’s that going to translate into ticket sales? Yeah.

[Peter Mac]
Well, you’re the promoter.

[Darran]
You got to be promoting and you drive and get all the people here for me.

[Peter Mac]
And it’s like, people want to see you. You know, I’m an agent as well for MN2S. I book DJs and I book big acts.

I’m not going to go into who I book. But to be honest, the promoters want to know how many Instagram followers DJs have, which is insane. That’s insane.

But they equate that to ticket sales. You know, all these influencers are getting booked to stay in Bora Bora the four seasons. They don’t have any talent.

They just have a lot of followers and they go there for a free vacation. It’s insane. I mean, I guess that’s the market today, but I don’t like where the market’s going.

I really don’t. It’s all fake. It’s not real.

It’s not real. But I guess digital is not real.

[Darran]
I mean, like I said, if I want to test somebody’s pure performance skill, I try to see what kind of demand are they truly in. And it’s not a pay to play, but I go here, here’s a ticket link. This is your specific ticket.

Push it out there. Let’s see how many tickets you sell. Yeah.

Well, that’s not me.

[Peter Mac]
I’m not a promoter.

[Darran]
So you’re not going to tell anyone that you’re playing at one of my shows. You’re not playing. It’s all on me.

Anyone I want, if I build it and I can get a thousand people to fill that room, it doesn’t matter who I put on stage. So why am I paying you $5,000? I can pay somebody $250 and they’re still going to play a great show to a thousand people.

[Peter Mac]
They rock the dance floor. For me, that’s the most important thing. A real dance floor, not a guy, a bunch of people standing with their iPhones.

I’m talking about a real dance floor. That for me equates a good DJ. If you can rock a real dance floor, you’ve done your job.

[Darran]
Yeah. And then that’s something that, is there a counterculture going to come down the line that says, put your cell phones away? We were talking about that a little bit earlier in the show.

[Peter Mac]
Well, it’s happening. It’s happening.

[Darran]
Thank God. I think it is.

[Peter Mac]
And I think you’re going to see that more and more.

[Darran]
I remember when Apple had applied for the patent to include an infrared sensor in the phones. And if you had a device, it was in there. They applied for the patent, never implemented it, but it was there as a patent that they would send out an infrared signal from the stage.

And when you went to record, it said, sorry, recording not possible. It would turn off the video portion of it.

[Peter Mac]
That’s a great tool.

[Darran]
Yeah. Right. I mean, that would be really awesome if they put something like that.

But of course they apply for the patent. They apply for thousands of patents every year, you know, because of R&D.

[Peter Mac]
But you know, we’ve been, we’ve been hijacked by technology, our minds. It’s controlling our dopamine release, you know, in our brain. And it’s, again, it’s, it’s like a drug.

It’s totally taken over so many organic types of music, arts, everything. It’s crazy. We’re talking again about movies as well.

All the superhero movies, you know, no content, just a lot of bells and whistles. It’s the same as going to a big show, you know, ultra, you know, a lot of fireworks, a lot of lights, all the amazing visuals, but it’s like the music’s like the not important anymore. It’s crazy.

Yeah.

[Darran]
Well, it goes back to the whole, the whole thing too, is I remember it was, I’m not, I haven’t been to the Burning Man, but it was when they first activated cell phone service at Burning Man. And now they have it. That was, I mean, some rich person probably brought in a tower so they could do it.

Probably bought a cell phone.

[Peter Mac]
But those people ruin any, any organic.

[Darran]
And now they have self-service at Burning Man. Yeah.

[Peter Mac]
But Burning Man’s not like Burning Man. It was 20 years ago.

[Darran]
I can’t believe they allowed that decision to be made.

[Peter Mac]
Yeah. Because they’re getting corporate funding now. It’s all changing.

Once the corporations get into anything to destroy, yeah. I mean, I’ve been quite harsh, but I’m being honest, you know?

[Darran]
No, that’s all good. It’s all good. So over the years, you’ve listened to a lot of music and in those listening to music, do you have three regular podcasts or live streams or radio shows that you listen to in the back end when it’s downtime and you’re not sitting at the desk in the studio?

[Peter Mac]
I rarely listen to music when I’m not making music. I need a break. My brain needs a break from the beats, literally.

I’m a big fan of other productions. I usually listen to other producers while I’m in the middle of making music because it stimulates the process. But when I’m, you know, not, you know, not making music, I’m trying to do something completely different away from technology and away from digital, you know, anything digital, you know, walking, spending time with the family, just getting away from that.

And in the end, it makes you a better producer because you need that break. As we were touching on before, you need that break. So I’m not, I don’t listen to podcasts.

I don’t really listen to other DJ sessions. I listen to their tracks, you know, on that I have, or I go through TrackSource and Beatport listening to different music. But in my free time, I don’t even listen to music.

[Darran]
You don’t need to break.

[Peter Mac]
It’ll drive you crazy.

[Darran]
It would. It would totally. Do you expect Beatport to have another serious competitor in the next few years?

Or do you feel they can maintain their monopoly?

[Peter Mac]
That’s an interesting question. Well, I buy my music from TrackSource, which is like underground house music, you know, bought by underground house music producers and DJs. So they stay in the underground niche.

And I don’t even know. I mean, maybe they want to become multimillionaires. I don’t know.

But they have their niche in the market. And for me, if it wasn’t for TrackSource, I don’t know where we would be, honestly. Beatport is more, you know, they make a lot of money.

They make a lot of money and they have everything on there now. They just put up some genres, you know, Latin. I think I forget the name of the it’s in a group of genres, like down tempo.

I don’t know what it is. I have to look. But they’re selling everything now.

If it has a beat, they’ll sell it. Whereas TrackSource, they just sell underground music, which is basically what I listen to. I mean, don’t get me wrong.

There’s some good commercial music.

[Darran]
I’ve never submitted a track. Obviously, I’m not a producer in that sense. But does TrackSource, are they are they an exclusive type?

[Peter Mac]
Like if you’re going to set with us, you can only set with us or you can release their music on Beatport and TrackSource at the same time. But I usually release my music with an exclusive two week period on TrackSource. It goes to Beatport, Spotify, Juno Download, all Apple Music.

But I usually put it exclusively first on TrackSource because I respect the music that they put out. And I spend 90 percent of my time listening to music on TrackSource and 10 percent on Beatport.

[Darran]
Awesome. Well, that’s some good tidbits of information. No other.

Hey, I guess the payouts better on TrackSource than Beatport. I don’t. Am I being too honest here?

Am I going to get blowback from all this? I don’t want to get you in trouble, but I don’t know what the contracts are.

[Peter Mac]
I’m being brutally honest. I like it. Everything’s been so saturated.

And again, with the with the tension span of people, I mean, I’ll listen to Beatport and like 90 percent of the stuff is is I would never buy. It’s crap. It’s crap music.

But in TrackSource, it’s a completely different thing. You know, like 50 percent of the music I think is is good.

[Darran]
You know, is there an approval process or can anyone just throw in?

[Peter Mac]
I think if you know, you know, to release on TrackSource, basically, if you know, if I talk to someone who says I just buy a track, they know, you know, maybe TrackSource one day will become huge. I hope so, because they they they release underground music. You know, we need to educate the younger people now because they’re just being hijacked from the music that they’re forced to listen to.

It’s not good music. You really have to educate them. It’s an education process.

Maybe they don’t have the attention span to spend that much time, you know, researching good house music. I don’t know. It’s things are changing, my friend.

You know, yeah, I mean, I don’t want to sound like a bitter old.

[Darran]
No, no, no, no.

[Peter Mac]
If I were to get to really enjoy good music, I mean, good music, good music. Sorry, that’s my dog. It’s OK.

Yeah. I really think it’s good music.

[Darran]
You know, if I were to enter the DJ game now, I mean, just to build up a decent collection that I would have of a library, I would need probably, let’s just say, a minimum of a thousand songs, which means how much do I have to listen to to put through? It’s going to get me. I just don’t want to download a collective of a thousand songs and then sort through the junk and have the good stuff.

[Peter Mac]
You know, I would get a glass of wine, put it on track source and just slowly go through the music and whatever grabs you. He said that has a nice beat, whatever. Buy it.

You know, he worked that way and build it that way. And you have to spend some time in club culture talking to other producers. And yeah, you do your research as well.

Watch old YouTube videos of parties back in the 90s, you know, and you see the vibe on the dance floor. It’s completely different from today.

[Darran]
Oh, yeah. Completely different. It’s crazy.

I mean, yeah. I mean, I can’t know. It’s I don’t want to bring that back.

[Peter Mac]
I think there’s a guy. Oh, the good old days, because, you know, there are some, you know, Eastern Europe, for example, they put on great house parties, you know, and in the States, underground music in Toronto. There’s a lot of underground venues, not a lot.

They’re not packed, but they exist.

[Darran]
Yeah, we actually. Yeah, we had a couple that were that are now gone. But yeah, it’s the commercial stuff that’s out there.

[Peter Mac]
The money got involved. The thing is, yeah. Every culture, once it becomes popular in the mainstream, it’s destroyed.

But the underground always stays somehow. Because the underground is because that’s where the good music is. And that’s where everything is.

It starts from, you know.

[Darran]
Totally. Well, we’re going to hopefully bring back that underground feeling again with some of the events we’re putting on, if not translate that to the screen through live streaming and bringing that back out and showing people, hey, look at that. That place is packed and everyone’s dancing.

There’s not one cell phone in the air. Well, that’s because we don’t let them in the club. It’s a good thing, man.

I hope it spreads. The word spreads. I think it will.

We’ll pioneer it. We’ll look at. I mean, we’re not the pioneers of it.

[Peter Mac]
But I mean, that’s kind of again, the bottom line, the promoters and the venue on the bottom line of making money, you know, that’s always going to enter the equation. But you can do it in a way where you make money and it’s a great event of music, you know?

[Darran]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Peter Mac]
I mean, we spend a bit less on the on the strobes and fireworks.

[Darran]
Yeah.

[Peter Mac]
Spend more money on good quality DJs.

[Darran]
Exactly. Exactly. And so on that note, is there anything else you want to let our DJ Sessions fans know before we let you go, Peter?

[Peter Mac]
Spend time listening to good house music. Go to a track source. Listen to good DJs.

Um, good DJ. I could say, you know, I could name a hundred, but I’m not going to. But there’s a lot of great, great DJs and there’s a lot of great house music out there.

You just have to search for it because it’s not going to be it’s not going to be sent to you. You have to look for it. You have to dig.

I think that’s a really important thing. And I really want, you know, younger clubbers today to really listen to music, good music and not something that you’re exposed to that you say, oh, you have to love this track because we’re playing it everywhere. You know, it’s that’s not the way it works.

It works by going. You have this great vehicle called the Internet and you can hear, listen to anything and you just have it’s like going into a library. You’ve got to pick the right books.

You know, you can walk through a library and not learn anything if you don’t pick out a book. But you have to, you know, you have the Internet, go to the sites that have really good music and listen. And I’m telling you again, good music is good music.

[Darran]
Yeah, that’s what I was searching. When I first started the show, I had a DJ. I asked him, so how many hours a day do you spend looking for music?

He goes three to four hours a day. What? I don’t have.

Yeah, but is he looking in the right place? There you go, too. I mean, that was and that was 16 years ago.

[Peter Mac]
Now, 15, 16 years ago, you don’t spend that much time.

[Darran]
No, I don’t think you’d have to.

[Peter Mac]
But even if you spend an hour a day now, you know, it’s the website set up a way to listen to the music that you put on a track. And then they’ll suggest by listening to that track. They’ll suggest like 16 other tracks that sound like that track.

They make it now so easy to find good music or music that you would like now. So there’s no excuse of sitting like for six hours a day looking for music. You don’t have to do.

You can spend 20 minutes and pick out five or six good tracks, you know?

[Darran]
Yeah. And again, congratulations on the release with Quantize. It’s coming out Friday.

I’m super excited to hear that.

[Peter Mac]
And I will reach out to DJ Spen as well. Yeah, and it’s coming out on Traxxas for two weeks and then its main release two weeks from Friday. I don’t know what that day is.

It’s going to be on Beatport, Juno Download, Spotify. That’s another thing we could spend an hour on talking about Spotify.

[Darran]
Definitely could. Definitely could. Yeah, that’s all.

Yeah, yeah. I was almost going down that route, but we had such a great conversation over here. It was like, I know.

We’ll save for next. I know I’m going to have you on the show again, Peter. Thank you again for being here today.

Where’s the best place people can go to find out more information about you and what you got going on?

[Peter Mac]
Okay, you can go to my Instagram page, Peter Mac Official. There it is. Online.

And I post three posts a week, mostly about music, sometimes personal things, but mostly about my music.

[Darran]
Awesome. Peter Mac Official. P-E-T-E-R-M-A-C.

Thanks for the plug there. Yeah, it was a pleasure. We’re definitely going to be following up with you.

There’s, like you said, we could probably start our own podcast series alone, which I know.

[Peter Mac]
It was great talking to you. I’m venting. You can tell I’m venting.

[Darran]
Yeah, it’s all good.

[Peter Mac]
About the state of the music business, you know? I mean, I love music. I love the music business, but there’s some things that have to be corrected, I think.

[Darran]
A side series that I started in 2020 out of this series was called the State of the Industry Sessions, and we’d sit down and pick a few topics. Wow. I actually have some people that you know that I pitched the idea to, and saying, hey, we should sit down 30 minutes a week, once a week, and just take two topics or three topics.

[Peter Mac]
I think it’s a great idea.

[Darran]
And go, boom, let’s do it.

[Peter Mac]
Next time you do it, invite me on. I’d be happy to join in on the conversation.

[Darran]
Well, Peter, it’s good how we got involved in this interview, if you know who I’m talking about. So I know we’ll be in talks with it, but thank you again for being here today. It was a pleasure having you.

[Peter Mac]
Thank you for having me, Derek. You’re welcome. Really appreciate it.

[Darran]
Yeah. On that note, don’t forget to go to our website, thedjsessions.com. Find all our social media links there.

700 news stories a month, live interviews just like this one, exclusive mixes, our new music section, and more coming out here soon at thedjsessions.com. I’m your host, Darran, coming to you from the Virtual Studios in Seattle, Washington, and that’s Peter Mac coming in from Toronto, Canada for The DJ Sessions. And remember, on The DJ Sessions, the music never stops.