Amber D on the Virtual Sessions presented by The DJ Sessions 8/13/24

In this dynamic Virtual Session, Darran Bruce sits down with UK-based DJ, producer, label owner, and educator Amber D for a lively deep dive into her multifaceted career. From her jaw-dropping 90-hour Twitch livestream that raised £8,000 for charity to teaching DJ skills in Sierra Leone and mentoring vulnerable youth in Leeds, Amber shares how her passion for music extends far beyond the decks. The conversation explores her long-standing relationship with the charity Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, her thoughts on the evolving live streaming landscape, and the mental health journey that shaped her personal and professional growth.

 

Amber reveals the origins and missions of her four independent record labels, her dedication to nurturing emerging artists through her interactive “Demo Drop” sessions, and her vision for helping talent progress in the industry. The two swap behind-the-scenes stories about streaming strategies, building authentic fan engagement, and navigating the challenges of sustaining a music career in a competitive and rapidly changing industry.

 

With candor and humor, Amber reflects on business lessons learned, the nuances of DJ bookings, and the importance of valuing creative work. Her mix of charitable initiatives, industry insight, and raw honesty makes this conversation as inspiring as it is captivating.

 

Whether you’re a DJ, producer, or passionate music fan, this episode delivers insight, motivation, and plenty of spirited banter that captures Amber’s signature energy and dedication to making a positive impact through music.

 

Host: Darran Bruce
Guest: Amber D
Location: Virtual Studios, Seattle WA & Doncaster, UK

Overview:
Darran Bruce welcomes celebrated UK DJ, producer, label owner, and educator Amber D for an insightful and entertaining conversation about her music career, charitable work, streaming innovations, and passion for mentoring the next generation of artists.

Topics Covered:

• Epic 90-Hour Charity Livestream: How Amber built up to her record-breaking Twitch stream, raising £8,000 to fund projects like building a well in Uganda and teaching DJing to youth in Sierra Leone.
• Partnership with Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: Four years of impactful collaborations, from “Set for Love” to mentoring young women at Getaway Girls in Leeds.
• Streaming Evolution & Mental Health Journey: Amber’s path from anonymous live streaming to building a vibrant Twitch community, plus candid reflections on her personal challenges and growth.
• Record Labels & Artist Development: Running four independent labels, fostering talent through “Demo Drop” sessions, and preparing artists for bigger industry opportunities.
• Industry Insights & DJ Economics: Real talk on bookings, the “pay to play” debate, and balancing artistry with business strategy.
• Education & Future Goals: Returning to university for a Master’s in music production with ambitions for a PhD—aka “Dr. D.”
• Community & Connection: Building a loyal fan base, creating safe spaces for mental health support, and encouraging authenticity in the music industry.

Call to Action:
Follow Amber D on Twitch: twitch.tv/djamber_d
SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/dj-amber-d
Explore more episodes and exclusive mixes at thedjsessions.com

[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 virtual studios in Seattle, Washington, our home base of operations and coming in all the way from Doncaster, United Kingdom, UK. We have none other than Amber D on the show today.

Amber, how are you doing today? Hi, I’m really good. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. Awesome. Yeah, I just want to give a shout out to all the fans that are tuned in so far via Twitch.

I can see them in the chat room over there on your channel coming in. Hi to all of my usuals as well. Nice to see you guys.

Yep, definitely. Oops, forgot to mute the TV behind me. We got Katie Pops, Diesel, you know, coming in, the Martin guy coming in.

Awesome. You know, Control 4 official, you know, coming in. Thank you for coming in and watching the show.

DJ DataBytes, I hope I said that right, Gramacy89. Okay, cool. Everyone’s coming in.

Go ahead, chat away, ask questions. I’ll try to pop some stuff in for you. But thank you so much for being here today, Amber.

[Amber D]
Thank you for having me. It’s been a long time coming as well, hasn’t it?

[Darran]
Yeah, the last interview we did was like in 2022. A lot was happening for us that year in 2022. Kind of took a little bit of a break through 2023.

It’s moving. I had to set up the new studio. Kind of took a little hiatus as I do every five years of burning the midnight oil.

Hell yeah.

[Amber D]
I think that’s an important thing to do.

[Darran]
But it was nice, the refresh, coming back in 2024. 2024, hitting it hard. But you know, it was something that’s near and dear to my heart that I’ve loved is our partnership with Twitch.

And I want to jump right into this because I was just reading over some of the notes of the show, some of the things you came up with. And I didn’t read it correctly because I thought it said, you do a 90 hour a minute show on Twitch. And when I looked back at my notes, I realized, no, it was a 90 hour live stream on Twitch.

I was like, what? I want to know more about this. How I came up with the concept of this 90 hour live stream on Twitch thing that you did?

[Amber D]
Hmm. Well, it was, it didn’t start with 90 hours. So it kind of, because you can’t, it kind of started with, I think I’d seen someone else doing like a 24 hour live stream, you know, like on Twitch, when you reach certain follow goals, that kind of thing.

And a few people had done one. And I thought, you know what, I’ve been doing this for about, there was probably about 20 years at the time, DJing. Very, very used to sleep deprivation.

And as you know, what it’s like with very, very late nights, I also have two children. And, you know, I’m very used to not sleeping. They were twins, and neither of them slept very well for a long time.

So I was like, okay, I’m going to give 24 hours a go. And I did it. And I think every single one of these ones that I’ve done, they’ve think they’ve, they’ve pretty much all been, if not all of them have been for charity.

And basically, I then did like a 48 hour one, I think I then did a 52 hour one, then I did a 74 hour one. And then I did the 90 hour one. And all of those were for charity.

I actually don’t think that it would be humanly possible for like, is a sensible, any sensible part of my being would never, ever just do that for me. It had to. And I remember, I had things written out on a notepad, reasons why I shouldn’t be going to bed right now.

Because part of my brain was just going, what are you doing? What are you doing? You should be going to sleep right now.

So I had a few things like, this is going to help so many people, you know, I made a breakdown of like all of this stuff that we we managed to do from that 90 hour lives. We raised 8000 pounds from that. It was insane.

We built a freaking well in Uganda with that. And also I ended up going to Sierra Leone and teaching street youth DJing over there, along with a whole other list of amazing artists, graffiti artists, music producers, all people that I am very, very close with to this day. And my students who I met over there, I’m still in daily contact with them, even even now.

So yeah, a lot of really, really good things came from that. But yeah, I don’t think anyone in their right mind would do it for no other, you know, accolade. But yeah, it was it was it was definitely something that you have to build up to.

And it’s also very different doing it without the use of recreational drugs as well, which used to be a lot easier back in the early 2000s to stay up for that long. So yeah, it was it was very, very, it was mentally and physically exhausting. And emotionally, but like I said, I’m already mental.

So you know, it’s not going to send me mental.

[Darran]
Well, like a lot of your fans really appreciate it. They’re in the chat room right now. I mean, Noodles, CRT, you know, Mihael Paz, I hope I said that right.

Mihael Paz. Mihael, yep. Diesel, Richie B.

They’re all like, yeah, it was awesome.

[Amber D]
Next you gotta go for 100 hours.

[Darran]
And the reason I find that so interesting that you know, years ago when I first started, this is back in 2013, when we really broke the DJ sessions off for my series, which was produced under ITV Live, was the live streaming portion of our shows. ITV was the broadcast television series of our shows that would go on TV here. And but one of my concepts is this is like I said, way back in the day, before everyone started thinking of live streaming as a medium, I wanted to do 100 DJs in 100 hours.

The thing is, the DJs only had to come in and play a one hour set. But me producing the show, I had to be on site for the whole 100 hours. Yeah, so I’m producing the show.

I’m the producer producing a 100 hour episode show. And what we’re going to do is when I got tired, I was going to set up a cot in the middle of the studio. Sleep on the cot in the middle of the studio during the show.

And then I wake up and like, okay, do something else. And this is before you even thought about really having moderators for shows or even somebody come in and pitch it for me. You know, while I’m taking a sleep, but my bed would be in the studio.

So I’d be sleeping in the middle of the show. I was going just the concepts that come up way back when I never accomplished that. And what’s cool though, now is I still want to do the 100 hours of live streaming.

But we use a technology here and I’m sure you’ve heard of it called silent disco. And I’m familiar with that. Yes.

[Amber D]
Like when they just listen to music in headphones, you mean?

[Darran]
Correct. Yeah. It all goes through wireless headsets.

Well, instead of having 100 DJs going through one by one by one, what I could do is I could have four DJ booths set up and just do the show for 25 hours, but it’d still be 100 hours of content produced on four separate… I have four separate channels on Twitch. Actually, I have six channels on Twitch.

But so like with our silent disco technology, I can have channel one, two, three, and four, and you can choose which channel you want to listen to.

[Amber D]
Wow. Yeah.

[Darran]
And what’d be cool is you’re at the event and there’s four DJs playing, but you can tap and choose. So if somebody… The cool thing about this is let’s say somebody’s at our event and they’re listening to the DJ in the red channel, they could go online and tell all their friends, watch this channel with me live on Twitch on the red channel.

But that person could be on our website. They could click and listen to the green channel. They could tell their friend who’s at the show, hey, you should check out, it’s fire on the green channel.

That person’s at the show and then switch over to the green channel and be listening to the show with them, this whole round trip process. Nobody’s really ever combined this technology together like that. Don’t steal my ideas out there, people.

They’re not trademarked. But yeah, I really wanted to do that because we have seven channel headsets. So I could have seven DJs playing at the same time, seven streams going on and not have to worry about the music crossing over into the other DJ booths because it’s all in headsets.

So there’s some cool concepts. Congratulations on that though. That is a feat within itself.

I’m surprised. I don’t know if I could ever do the 100 hours. That’d be an interesting show, but congratulations on that.

And you mentioned that you had… It’s for charity and you do this a lot for charity work. Tell me a little bit about the charity work.

You work with an organization called Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, one of my best favorite songs of all time, by the way.

[Amber D]
I love that track. They are amazing. They are just so supportive.

I’ve been working with them for at least four years now, at least, probably longer. And it started with… They were doing…

And they still do. They do these things called set for love. So what they would do is they would get DJs, including people like Carl Cox, who’s also very, very involved with the charity.

And we would all do a set for love on a live stream. And it would be as many… You could have as many…

It wasn’t one channel, like you said, Giselle. Everyone could do their set for love on their own channel, whatever that was on, Facebook, Twitch. And it worked very, very well and does continue to.

So I first came onto their radar from doing that and basically then just driving up my hours doing these set for loves. And I thought, I really, really like these people. And when you just get a good feeling and you intuitively know these people hold my morals, my values, I can…

There’s just something that’s telling me you have to go into this further. So I thought, well, I need to prove to them that I have something of value for them. And so that’s kind of where I thought, well, the best way I can do that is by doing a really long live stream and just making as much money as I possibly can for them.

And it worked. And then I met them all and we all started working together. They took me in and we went to Sierra Leone and we did that.

And they’ve also very recently had me working on another project of theirs called Getaway Girls. Well, Getaway Girls is like an entity in itself. It’s in a place called Leeds in the UK.

And it’s part of Last Night DJ Saved My Life’s Get Equipped funding. So Beatport were wonderful. They donated $15,000 from their parity and equity fund to Last Night DJ Saved My Life.

And they in turn then sent me out to teach DJing to a number of girls at Getaway Girls in Leeds. And I’ve been teaching them for a number of months now. So completely from scratch.

And it’s all young girls between the ages of like, say, 10 and maybe early 20s who come from maybe vulnerable backgrounds, need extra support. And obviously being a parent of two teenage girls, I knew that I would be able to charm them and get them to listen to me. And they were just wonderful.

And it makes my heart sing to be able to give back something from all of the years of experience that have led me to where I am now. You know, you can’t take any of this knowledge with you when you go. And yeah, it’s lovely to have the accolades of a DJ and be adored and be on that stage and everyone’s shouting your name.

But really, you know, it feels quite sad to think that all of that energy is just for that. You know, it felt like I needed something more. I needed something more sincere to allow me to maybe, you know, when I eventually do die, not for a long time, with a massive smile on my face, knowing that I left this world a little bit brighter than it was when I got here.

And that’s really what Last Night A DJ Saved My Life means to me is that ability to do it. They do so much more stuff behind the scenes that doesn’t involve me. So if anyone ever does want to donate or get involved with all of the other stuff that they do, there’s so many things that they do.

I think they’re recently going to be, or soon they’re going to be doing a walk along Mount Kilimanjaro. There’s always stuff that they’re doing to raise funds. So yeah, please, please make sure you go and check out Last Night A DJ Saved My Life.

[Darran]
Awesome on that. Yeah, you know, I know the feeling when I started in years ago, I’d mentioned just a little bit ago about my broadcast television show ITV, that the precursor of that was a show called Phantasmagoria, Northwest Extremes, where it’s an image nightlife, which later morphed into the DJ sessions. You’ve been busy.

Oh, I’ve been busy. I’ve been doing this game for 35 years. I turned 50 this month.

Actually, next week. Oh, you don’t look it. Yeah.

So no, I mean, I’ve been doing this for a while, but no, I’m one of the founding principles that I had when I first started this, even going back to my early days in the early 2000s, was to have kind of what I call an open door policy or open questions policy. Like if anyone in the industry wanted to aspire and be in the same line of work that I did, I have no problem giving them what I call 98% of my information. Um, I reserved 2% of that information.

That’s usually my email list and my Rolodex of phone numbers. And I say Rolodex because people don’t even know what Rolodexes are probably.

[Amber D]
I know what that is.

[Darran]
For those who don’t know, it’s an old school where you put a physical card into the Rolodex and you’d have to twist it around and it was labeled alphabetically and you pull your Rolodex and pull the contact card out, put the contact card back in when you wanted to make contacts. Anyways, so yeah, I don’t give away my Rolodex or my email list because that’s very highly coveted information. But other than that, I’ve always strived to help out the community, help build the community in some way, shape or form for, you know, I was at an event this weekend and there was a podcaster there and he’s like, you know, how do you get started?

How do you become as big as you are? And I say, I go to the podcasters all the time and they’re like, how much money do I have to spend on a studio? How much money do I have to spend to get involved?

I go, do you have a fucking phone? Do you have a laptop with a camera on it? Get started with that.

Don’t go spend a bunch of money because you don’t even know if you want to do this yet. Do it, yeah. Let alone, don’t go spend thousands of dollars on a gear and then sit there and it’s collecting dust in a box, not doing anything.

Use your phone, use your computer. Then number two, you know, I go down the list of the top five or six things that they should really look at if they’re going to do this and help out. And I say, I’m here for questions.

But I say, oh, can I get your contact information for your contacts at Twitch? I’m like, no, no, no. Those are highly coveted contact people.

You can go through the front door just like I kind of had to back in the day.

[Amber D]
Yeah, well, this is it. And also, you’re right in that because I think there’s a, like these days we have GDPR to think about as well, which is sharing people’s information. We’re not even allowed to do that anymore.

So it’s not even a case of you being mean by not sharing that. But I like the way that you say that, you help people with 98% of this stuff because it does, it feels good. It does feel good to help.

[Darran]
Yeah, the thing, I did have to take that down to 97% in 2020, though, because I always feel that because I was the guy that was doing live streaming for like 10 years of DJs and everything, my phone and contacts, I was just sort of blown off the hook. Blown up because people are like, how do I do this? How do I get around DMCA?

How do I stream live? How do I cameras? I’m like, I can’t give you legal advice.

Two, it’s all right there in the terms and conditions.

[Amber D]
Yeah, I think that the way I had the exact same thing, especially if you remember around COVID, we had a lot of people then go straight on to live streaming. And again, I was involved with something called We Are Viable. And I gave away, usually I have this kind of information behind a paywall.

I have a DJ group on Facebook. And it was at the time of COVID, I just said, you know what? I want people to be able to come away from being worried that they can’t make any money, especially with artists.

And a lot of this, obviously, the nighttime industries was fucked. So I made like a big PDF file of all of the different ways that you can live stream. I went through every single operating system.

So we went through Mac and PC and then every different phone. And I went through everything to like ethernet cables, how much megabytes per second upload you need per webcam. I went through absolutely everything.

And I documented it in autistic detail to the letter. And I still had people asking me questions because they hadn’t read it.

[Darran]
Yeah, they wouldn’t read it. It’s like, well, just read the documents. It’s all right there.

But you know, probably to people like you and I, it seems like you naturally fell into this. How long have you been streaming for?

[Amber D]
Oh, okay. So officially, like with Twitch, maybe like four years. But I used to go live in secret.

I used to go live on something called live.me. And also, I remember I used to go live on something called chat roulette. If you remember chat roulette. But I used to do it at a time where I went through quite a tough time with my mental health.

As I think all people do, especially artists. I think, you know, when you’re a creative and you have a lot of time to think, it can be a natural thing that happens to us. And I’ve spoke very, very openly about it.

And I’m now a trained mental health first aider as well. And one of the main things that we do is we talk about, you know, these things that myself and also my other half guy, he was even sectioned as well for, you know, going through his mental health stuff. But I, in that time, I had not a lot of, I didn’t have a lot of confidence.

In fact, I’ve lost a lot of my confidence as a DJ. I went through a divorce. I went through postnatal depression.

I was having issues with thinking, you know, like these identities, who am I? What am I? You know, am I a good parent?

Am I a good enough person? You know, and having a lot of the wrong people around me. And when I started to come away from all of that, I had my hermit mode.

You know, you said about you having your hiatus. I did a similar thing for a bit for a number of years. And in that time, I used to spend a lot of time live streaming anonymously to kind of get my confidence up.

And I met some really, really interesting people in that time. And it was, there was another piece of software that we used to use. I can’t remember the name of it now, but it was really expensive.

It was, oh, what was it called? It will come back to me. But it was like, it was before we had OBS, basically.

So it was like a thing that allowed you to then use overlays and things like that. And I remember coming across Twitch and I thought, my God, I remember it was like at least 10 years ago. It was before we had DJs on Twitch at all.

And I remember thinking this would be an amazing platform for people to DJ on because there were these gamers and they had like 16,000, you know, and that’s nothing in terms of the numbers these days. People watching someone playing a game are like, what are you doing? Why are you watching someone just playing a game?

We need to get on this. But it wasn’t until years later that that kind of like all came into place. And I personally then started properly live streaming.

But I would say it was a little bit before the COVID thing happened. And then I think everyone piled on at that point, which was really good because I think it’s changed the landscape for things now. And I think that as DJs, we are being taken a lot more seriously, I guess.

And obviously that comes with its pitfalls as well. I know Twitch are making a lot of changes now with their new DJ program and all that kind of thing. But I love it.

I have found a new lease of life on this platform. I’ve made some lifelong friends. You know, I get to meet people like yourself.

You know, we would never usually ever come into contact with each other. So I find it exciting. Every single time that I’m about to go live, I am looking forward to seeing my friends, you know, and just having a laugh.

And sometimes that gets me in trouble because sometimes you’ll get someone in the chat and they’ll be like, why are you talking all over the music? I’m like, I’m sorry. But fuck you, this is my channel.

I’m going to talk even more now because I get excited to see everyone. And I am quite careful when it comes to the trance though. I do kind of like step back a little bit, maybe not talk as much.

But yeah, I love it. I absolutely love it.

[Darran]
And you know what’s funny? If you were to go do a simulcast, which you could easily do, you could cast one with the music and you talking. You cast one with just the music going out.

I could tell you that post-show if you already know how to do it, it’s all good. I don’t know how to, but that sounds awesome. But what would happen is, you know what would happen is people would go and watch the one without the music, I mean, without you talking on it.

And they’d say, I can’t hear your microphone, what’s wrong? No, but I show you some tricks you can do with like, I can show you with Streamlabs and I can show you with, see, this is collaborating. You don’t know, but I want to share this information with you.

[Amber D]
Let me show you a cooler.

[Darran]
I was showing you some tricks in Restream before, you know, some things there. But you can, so this is a little trick for you streamers out there that want to get around some DMCA stuff, but you didn’t hear it from the DJ sessions is, what we used to do is we would stream live a lower quality version to Facebook, to YouTube, to wherever they would have active listening. But we would stream it without the audio.

And we put a little caption on the bottom to listen to this with the audio. Go to our website, thedjsessions.com. So it’s still streamed there, but it’d just be the video streaming, not the audio.

[Amber D]
I like that, that’s coming soon on Facebook.

[Darran]
Yeah, I could send that everywhere I wanted to and wouldn’t have to worry about takedowns. And it was like a four-hour commercial. People never got onto that.

And you just get, you could run, I could run Restream on one side and I could run, you know, StreamElements or I could run OBS on one laptop and then run a way lower version on Streamlabs and saying, boom, here you go. So it’s totally doable. That’s awesome.

But anyways, I could talk tech talk all day long. We’re here to talk about you, Amber, what you’re up to. Now, in addition to the charities you run, you have your stream that you do and all that fun stuff.

What are the top, do you get time to listen to other people’s shows? And if so, what are the top three podcast live streams you listen to?

[Amber D]
I have never been asked this question, which is fantastic. Oh, okay, okay, okay. These are the three top streamers that I watch regularly.

Okay, number one, the one that I watch pretty much every single day of my life is Kit Boga. Have you heard of Kit Boga?

[Darran]
No.

[Amber D]
What?

[Darran]
Maybe.

[Amber D]
Okay, let me tell you, he’s actually live right now. Okay, so Kit Boga, actually there’s four. So Kit Boga is a scammer.

He is a scambaiter. So but he’s really, really clever with it. So he’ll like ring up.

This is like a very basic thing of what he does. He rings up scammers who are like trying to scam old people out of money. And he pretends to be an old person by using a voice changer, which I’ve actually got the same voice changer.

It’s like a, what’s it called? One of these. It’s like a little voice transformer thing.

I use it on my decks. So it’s by Roland and they’re fantastic. They’re really cool.

But he’s done like improv and he’s done like acting, I think at school or college or whatever. And his characters are really believable. And I just love watching how like he can just improv this whole like spiel to like this scammer.

And he just wastes their time. But I’ve been watching him so much for so long. Becky Safe loves him as well.

Yeah. Hi, Becky. And the second one would be the second, the one that I watched the second amount, not the one that I like the most, because I like all of them for different reasons.

But second one would be one called Asmongold or Zach Roar, who’s like a gamer, but he does a lot of really cool react streams where he’ll just like watch with his community. He’ll just like watch old documentaries or something of like current interest. And I just like his take on stuff.

I find him quite funny, quite comedic. So he’s really cool. Number three would be Forest of Wires.

He’s a streamer on Twitch as well, who he’s a guitarist, he’s a pianist, but he’s also obviously done like a load in film. And he pretends he’s like, he doesn’t pretend he is, he’s a mage, he’s a wizard. He’s a wizard and he lives in Cackle Keep.

And so like the whole thing is like backdrops of a castle. And then in the chat, if you’re subscribed, you can put like wizard spells. So you can put Kalzen and then the chicken appears and he knows that’s my chicken.

So he’s made sure he has not taken that chicken out of the stream because I love that chicken. And then the fourth one is a guy called the Sushi Dragon, who is just amazing. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Sushi Dragon either.

So the Sushi Dragon, he’s very ADHD like me. He gets like really involved with like graphics and stuff. And he’ll like pay for a song to be played and then he’ll like do loads of like really cool graphics using like snap cam and magic music visuals, loads of other stuff to kind of like trigger with these little MIDI controllers.

It’ll trigger like different patterns and different colors and shapes and stuff. You just have to watch it to understand what it’s all about. But they’re all very different to the things that I do.

But I would say that I’ve definitely taken inspiration from them and I think it’s quite important to watch different stuff as well. I kind of like the ASMR stuff to a degree as well. But then some of my favorite DJs on Twitch would be, someone’s mentioned there, DJ Seaweed, who’s Danish.

She’s really cool. Obviously, Becky Safe, because she’s in the chat. And if I don’t say that, she will hit me.

And of course, DJ Brisk, because I am in team Brisk on Twitch, which is the best team to be in on Twitch. I’m just reading the comments at the moment. Yeah, a few of the people know about Kit Boga as well.

But yeah, those are my favorite. I’ve never been asked that before, so thank you.

[Darran]
Oh, you’re welcome. Yeah, I know. I always love to hear what other people are listening to, what their go-to is.

One of my big go-tos, if anyone gets to know me, is Soma FM out of San Francisco. They produce a down-tempo ambient chill station called Groove Salad. And it’s like, it’s always on the background of my office.

It’s always under my car. Unless I’m driving around our mobile studio, then we’re playing the boom boom stuff, Fresh or Fisher or something really big to get attention. Or the DJs are playing some awesome music from our mobile studio.

But if anyone knows me, if my bucket list is, I’m on a stranded island, it’s my pair of Persols, my king-size Cerns and Foster bed, and Groove Salad played on the background 24-7. I’m cool.

[Amber D]
Nice.

[Darran]
I don’t have food necessities, but that’s what I’m on. And that’s my thing. But I watch a lot of stuff online too.

But yeah, I actually went and checked out Kit Boga. I mean, 6,000 people watching the show right now. That’s doing pretty good on Twitch over there.

[Amber D]
Yeah, I think it’s mainly, I mean, this is probably something that’s quite useful for people to know is the whole transferring from YouTube to Twitch kind of thing. Because he does a lot of his streaming on Twitch, but then he converts it into content for his YouTube channel. You know, it’s something that I’ve tried so many times to do, but I’m not getting that conversion very well.

But I know that if you do, if I could just get the YouTube right, I think it would be really, really beneficial for the live streaming stuff as well.

[Darran]
Definitely can have an off-air chat about that as well.

[Amber D]
Thank you.

[Darran]
Absolutely. You know, we got a lot to talk about. A little bit of time here.

You know, I want to say I’m a huge, huge advocate for education. And you are also, it looks like you’re taking a step in that direction with education or furthering your educational knowledge, your education. And you were going back to university to get a master’s in music production.

What was the driving force behind that? Because I ask this question a lot to DJs. Is music theory something that a DJ should learn about?

Or is it necessary?

[Amber D]
Music theory is definitely, if you want to do music production, it’s important to learn some music theory. But I’d say the hard and fast educational route is not a prerequisite for, you know, becoming a really good or popular or successful music producer. In fact, sometimes it can actually get in the way.

So I started my university journey three or four years ago now when COVID hit. So as soon as COVID hit, I was like, okay, we’ll up the live streaming. But what else am I going to do with my time?

Because I thought, I just intuitively thought, I think this is going to last for a while. So I was like, you know, I never ever got to go to uni when I was a kid. Because my mum died when I was 17 from a short illness.

And then I was out on my own. I was actually homeless for a little while. And then I fell into DJing.

It’s a long story short. But I always remember thinking, shit, I would have loved to have gone to university. Because it was just at that age where I would have moved from being a full-time education.

I’d just done a bit of college. And then I would have gone on to university. So I thought, you know what?

I’m going to go. I’m going to go to uni and do it as a mature student. So I started with a foundation degree in electronic music production.

And then I did the BA honours. So Bachelor of Arts with honours. I think I was two points off a first, which I was gutted about.

But it is what it is. And then I’ve had a year out now. And I have just now finished my…

I had to do like a little display of what I can do to get myself in for this master. So I’m just waiting for a response from them to see if I’ve got in. I can’t see why I wouldn’t.

But you don’t know. So I sent them an email the other day. I was like, oh my god, oh my god.

And they’re like, just wait. All right, OK. So if it isn’t this year, it’ll be next year.

But yeah, the masters, I’m really looking forward to. And then after that, I might do a PhD in music as well. Which basically, the only reason why this is going to happen is just so that people have to call me Dr. D. Like, that’s literally it. People that I don’t like, they’ll be like, no, no, no, no. Doctor.

It’s Dr. D.

[Darran]
Wow, that’s awesome. That sounds like something I would do.

[Amber D]
Yeah.

[Darran]
You’re going to have to call me Dr. Bruce.

[Amber D]
Yeah.

[Darran]
Oh, that’s so awesome. Right on. Well, congratulations.

I’m sure you’ll definitely, definitely get in there. I know how it is. Thank you.

When you sound like you’re a go-getter, you’re a, what’s the term I’m looking for? There’s a word I’m looking, not a, I don’t want to say aggressive because that can have kind of like, you’re definitely on the forefront of moving forward with things and taking charge.

[Amber D]
Yeah, what it is, is after many years of, you know, like I said about, you know, you called it hiatus. I called it, you know, I had a deep depression and I was a hermit for a long time. I learned so much about myself in that time.

I did so much soul searching and I honestly feel like it’s really important sometimes to do that. It doesn’t have to be for years, you know, it just needs to be just like the cycles where we have spring, summer, autumn, winter, you know, we have to go back into ourselves to regrow, to renew, to, you know, improve, you know, and be different and want different things. So I do think that this is just a part of my natural life cycle where I am in the action orientated part of my life right now, you know, and I see that in my partner as well where he’s actually two years younger than me and he started to come into his action part of his world as well and his life.

And it’s so nice to see how like energetically we will then take on different roles within the household for the kids and, you know, support each other in those different ways. So for the last four or five years, I’ve been the one that’s brought in all of the income to the house and he’s been the house husband which has lifted me and he’s like my guru. I love him so much.

He’s really helped me through a lot of my spiritual and emotional things and also physically by feeding me lots of food which is great. And now I see that that’s changing now because he’s now doing his thing and he’s got like his own Patreon. He’s also a music producer.

He’s an amazing music producer and a lot of the people in the chat will know who he is. His name’s Guyver. He’s a very, very well-known European hard trance producer and he used to engineer my music like 20 years ago as well.

But yeah, we’ve been together for like 11 years now and it’s really nice to see how we can help each other and because I don’t think, I think without that support there, I wouldn’t be able to be in this action orientated part of my life and be doing my masters. You know, it’s really important to have that support network there and in order for me to be good for society and to help other people as well to as much of my ability as I can, that’s what happens is having, you know, what’s the saying? Behind every great man is a great woman and I think the opposite is also true.

We all need each other.

[Darran]
You couldn’t be more than right. It takes a village, you know, to raise a community, you know, but you gotta have that support structure. I mean, I’ve been doing this, you know, on my own and have people in and out of my life and all that fun stuff but, you know, I really, it takes a team to do all this.

You know, I was just on the phone with my, just on a call with my, I guess you could say my UK consultant. I have a marketing consultant for another company. I have website consultants.

I have, you know, I have my own research. I have my team of resident DJs that I work with, you know, other business partners.

[Amber D]
I need some of those. I’m all of those things. I’m not a very good consultant for myself sometimes either.

[Darran]
Well, you just learn, there’s a point where you can only do so much in a given day because you have to sleep, you have to eat. Most people, I am fortunate enough that I get to do this as a full-time job. I mean, I run two companies but, you know, I have the flexibility of doing things like this as a kind of lifelong dream of mine.

And just like we were talking pre-show, I’m now stepping up where we launched to make it a more international show where I’ve been to Amsterdam the last couple of years for ADE. I’m going to Berlin this week to cover Rave the Planet, you know, and being able to get out. I’ve been offered to go to Mexico City to go do stuff down there, to Ibiza, you know, and do stuff there.

And, you know, I never went to, I went to college. I have enough credits for, enough credits, let’s just say two business degrees. But, you know, I never went to school for journalism but I’m being asked to go tour and be on site and do journalism duties of covering an event, interviews on the ground, interviews, red carpet interviews, things of that nature.

And that’s like been a lifelong dream for me. Of course, I wouldn’t mind being the true executive producer of the show and have a team of people around the world doing this so we can expand. But, you know, as the saying goes, the show must go on.

If I sat around waiting for those people to show up or trying to wrangle those people to show up, there’d be no show produced by everybody else in the world that’s doing their show. And then finally, you know, my show airs and it’s like, oh, now I’m number 8,000 in line of another DJ show. You know, it goes back to that essence of when I did my first broadcast television show and I had six episodes in the can and a season was 13 episodes.

And I said to the person I was talking to, I said, I’m going to wait until I have 13 episodes in the can to launch. And she said, no, Darran, you take and you air those six episodes right now. Because in the meantime, what could happen is somebody else could produce a variety show, air it, and now you’re number two looking like you copied them rather than them copying you.

And I took my financial aid money and I got a little bit of a loan from my mom and I bought my six time slots on the air and I ate popcorn for like two weeks in college. The free popcorn from the student lounge, you know, for one.

[Amber D]
That’s awesome.

[Darran]
You know, and there’s been some interesting stories there. And, you know, aired those six shows. And then, you know, when I came around to season two of it, you know, I realized even if I had six shows in the can, I could just re-air those six episodes again.

It’s probably if somebody wasn’t watching week one and they were watching week seven, they probably would think that’s just a new episode.

[Amber D]
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And don’t you think it did it feel good for you that, you know, you had to kind of make those sacrifices, you know, and like you say, you had to eat popcorn and because that’s all part of it, isn’t it?

It’s all part of that. The struggle makes it all feel it’s that facing, you know, or just taking that risk and taking that leap. And I think that’s really commendable.

It’s so cool that you did that.

[Darran]
Yeah. The toughest thing and I’ve had to explain this unfortunate truth, I would say, to the entertainment industry is, you know, there’s a million like back and broad. This is all we had was broadcast television.

This is 2000. Like let’s go all the way up to 2000, pre-YouTube, pre-2005. You could do an audio podcast.

Okay, great. Because we had iPods. You could listen to an iPod, you know, an audio.

But for video, your distribution medium was limited, in the states at least, to public access television, which is aired and it’s gone, or broadcast television, which you have to go through FCC, all this stuff to get it qualified to air on there. And that was it. For video distribution, there was no really video online.

I mean, you put a video up and it was like this big.

[Amber D]
Yeah, yeah.

[Darran]
You know, you couldn’t see it. You might be able to hear it. It’s probably 96k audio quality.

It sounded like crap, you know. And then all of a sudden, you know, while I was working for Apple, the video iPod came out, which kind of was a game changer, put video in your pocket. Video podcasts were released.

We were one of the first video podcasts in the iTunes store when that section got released in 2005. And that’s what changed my game from going from broadcast television to distributing digitally. And we bypassed YouTube at the time because we saw YouTube kind of being like a TikTok where YouTubed, not broadcast television.

We were trying to be like, we want to be on like Hulu or Netflix or something where you’re going to pay on demand for our shows, like an NBC channel. And that never came to fruition until later. But long story short, you know, we had to, you know, switch that dynamic up and wanted to be one of the first people there with our content.

So I was going somewhere with that. But yeah, oh, the sacrifice. What I was saying, the unfortunate truth is in this game, the entertainment game, it is kind of money based because if you’re at that tier, I’m not going to spend any money on that.

And let’s say there’s 10 million people streaming. Well, and they’re all doing it at the free level. What happens when you increase your budget to say $500 a month?

Yeah, out of that 10 million people, maybe to that 1 million people that are spending $500 a month. And then what do you spend? $1,000 a month or you spend $2,000 a month and you’re taking your hobby income and you’re spending on the development of your brand, which is a marketing cost, by the way, which is a write off when you start up a company.

[Amber D]
Yes, it is.

[Darran]
You know, you know your taxes, you know your rights. I’m not a certified accountant, but that’s what I went to school for was two business degrees and accounting and you can write this off and you basically are investing in your business and your growth. But when you get to the ability where you’re spending $2,500 a month and you got all this facets, I mean, I have virtual assistants, I have press people, I have website development, social media influencers, all that fun stuff going on and becomes a business, you can start saying, well, now I’m going to charge people to advertise on my show and recoup some of that money back.

Yeah. And you’re going to be at that top level of those maybe 100,000 or 50,000 people that are really developing their business and being the top, you know, top podcast or top live stream genres. But I see people all the time thinking they’re going to get there for free.

And it’s like, well, what are you doing different than the person next to you that’s doing it?

[Amber D]
Yeah, well, this is why you having two business degrees was a good idea, because usually people like me, we’re creatives. We don’t have that part of our brains active at all.

[Darran]
I made the choice in college in my first year, did I want to go the filmmaker route, which is what everyone wants to do. They want to become the next Lucas Spielberg, all that. I’m like, no, I’m going to the business side of things because I knew one day I needed to know how to write a business plan.

The reason I went to college was to learn how to run my own corporation so I could have my own production company and be the executive producer, knowing how to talk to banks, knowing how to talk to finance people, knowing those numbers and being able to run the company, not the artist going, oh, we’ll just figure it out as we go along.

[Amber D]
That’s been my business model for 24 fucking years. Yeah, I mean, It’s only just paying off as well. That’s the crazy thing.

24 years later, and I’m now making a natural profit.

[Darran]
The funny thing is, is I have people that have accused me, I guess I don’t want to, I’m not trying to toot a horn here or anything, but I’ve had people literally accuse me of making a quarter million to $500,000 a year and not paying staff or paying people or this, that, and that money. At the time they were accusing me, which is so funny, I actually was on disability, on food stamps, didn’t know how I was paying my rent next month, and they’re thinking that I’m making these hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I’m a non-profit charitable organization, and I’m like, what are you even talking about? You’re attacking me thinking I’m making all this money.

I don’t make a dime off of any of this. I’m putting in all the hours you see go behind the scenes. Everyone thinks I just turn on a video camera and talk to you.

That’s all my job is. No, there’s 40, 50, 60 hours a week sometimes of all this backing stuff and finance and stuff going. So I totally understand where you’re coming from.

I’m building it up from the ground up.

[Amber D]
That’s it, we do it for less than minimum wage. We do it for the love of it. At the end of the day, one thing I have really recognized now and something that I say to my students a lot is it is okay to make money from your creativity and valuing what you do is so important.

I actually think if we talk about the state of DJs and DJing in general, that I think the quality level goes way down at events now when DJs are just putting themselves out for free. There’s a whole thing now of DJs selling tickets to events. So they’re doing the job of the promoter.

It’s not something that I’ve ever subscribed to at all. Each to their own with it, but I definitely do have an issue with people not getting paid for their creative time.

[Darran]
Yeah, that’s been the debate. I mean, that’s the whole pay to play concept.

[Amber D]
Oh my God, did you see that? Oh, there’s something recently about an event. I’m not going to mention the name of it in Ibiza and it was like 5,000 pounds to play on the lineup.

It’s a really weird one because it’s like, naturally you’d say, I’m not going to do that. However, as a business decision, if you have the money there, it’s one of those things where you’ve got to think, well, what kind of career path are you having? Are you going to do it the hard way or are you going to do it in a…

I guess there really is an art form to marketing and that’s something that I’ve had to come to terms with because I do have my own bias. I have done for many years, but I really do with a lot of soul search and I’ve really thought to myself now, I think that this comes from this whole suffering artist kind of syndrome that we’ve all had, this poor suffering, woe betide me kind of thing. So yeah, I think it’s an interesting one, but I still don’t know what I think about that.

[Darran]
Well, the difficult thing is, I totally understand both sides of the fence. Years ago, a DJ came to mind, friend of mine, know him for years. He comes to me and says, you know what?

I’m just as good as Tiesto. So if they’re going to book me at this nightclub, they’re going to pay me Tiesto’s rates because I can play just as good as Tiesto can. I go, here’s the fucking problem, dude.

You’re not Tiesto and you can’t book 25,000 people at an arena to come pay $100 a ticket for. Just because you can play the same tracks, just because you mix and beat match and put together a story. You’re a great DJ, but your name isn’t attached to that.

You’re not getting a residency at Hakkasan in Vegas. People are flying into Vegas to see Tiesto play at Hakkasan. Exactly, because it’s Tiesto.

It’s Tiesto. I’m using that as a high-end example, but one of my resident DJs told me a story once. When he first went out to get his first residency in Los Angeles, and he was a DJ, he goes to the club, and we call it the peanut story, and I use this from time to time.

When talking to people about this, he goes into the nightclub, he talks to the owner of the club, and he goes, hey, I want to come in here. I’d like a residency. I’d like to DJ in your club.

And the owner of the club says, you know what? Okay, how many people are you going to bring into this club if I let you have a night here? He goes, what do you mean?

You’re the promoter. You’re the owner of the club. You should be bringing the people in, and I’ll provide the music for them.

The owner says, okay, well, if you tell me you aren’t going to bring anything into the club right now, because people coming to the club are going to buy drinks. He goes, right now, these peanuts that are sitting in my bar are more valuable than you are being in my nightclub, because these people are going to eat the peanuts, and they’re going to want to drink, because they’re eating the peanuts. And if you can’t bring people into my club, then it’s not there.

And the disparity that the DJ thinks, well, I’m a good DJ. You should be paying all that money out to have me play on your show. Well, wait a second.

Are you going to bring people in the door? Yes. And in great, yeah, I have all this infrastructure, but I have to cover all those costs.

My rent, I have to cover the marketing. I have to cover the staff. I have to cover the insurance.

I have to cover the liquor license. All that stuff that, yes, you’re coming in. You’re playing the music.

I’m not anti this. I get it, because the thing goes back to that saying on Facebook that goes, well, I’m the DJ. I’m the one that plays the music and keeps everyone here.

Okay. You want to play that way from a business perspective? I’ll put on a fucking jukebox and say, bye.

I’ll put on Spotify. Have a nice fucking day. You know, I’ll stream live.

I’ll stream Amber D’s set into the club and say, fuck it. We got Amber D playing virtually in the club right now, which is another concept of mine that I think is very underutilized. That people should be doing virtual sets in nightclubs.

They could tap directly into the nightclub and you would only be broadcast into the nightclub to have a chat room active in the nightclub. And that way, I’m not trying to say people will get paid less, but you wouldn’t have to cover the rider fees of all the hotel and flight expenses. You’re still doing an exclusive mix into the club that could interact with the shows.

Don’t steal my ideas, people. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.

No, go ahead and do it. I’d love to see people do it.

[Amber D]
You make a lot of valid points there.

[Darran]
Again, yeah. It goes to, I’d love to book you. I would love to book everyone, but you’re right.

People do have to get paid for their time. And with so many DJs that are so hungry though, and you saw this with Pandy when it blew up, is you had people from the top of the top started live streaming. Never would even look at it as a medium, started live streaming.

Then you had the kid who never even thought about DJing say, I got some decks and I want to do a DJ show on Twitch because everyone else is doing, I’m going to blow up and be big there. Because they can never get a foothold into their local community, their local scene because they aren’t part of the good old boys club or they aren’t part of paying their dues. And so if it comes down to paying your dues, well then what would it be bad if somebody said from a marketing standpoint, I’ll pitch in $500 to your event as long as I get some guaranteed stage time and get on the flyer.

I’ve had people I said, look, you want to book your own, you want to go on tour. You want to play in other states, set aside some money and call up these clubs that you want to play in, in other cities and say, hey, promoter, I want to book my own tour. I will pay everything for me and I’ll give you 250 bucks or I’ll give you 500 bucks to get on your stage.

So I can be part and maybe I’m the opening DJ for your main act, but I’m going to tour around and I’ll pay you to be on your stage and do that in 10 or 15 markets to say I’m going on tour. That’s a good idea. This is showmanship.

This is business and you’ve got to pay for marketing and PR. Unless you’re going to pay for influencer. The thing is we all don’t have daddy warbucks or grandma passing away and giving us a bunch of money or I use the expression, I knew this kid, his parents had built the major highway system.

I five here in the Seattle area. So they come from millions and millions of dollars. People just don’t have that laying around.

So how do you use these tips and tricks to get in? You know, and is that when people shut up? Oh, well, he paid to get up there.

Well, yeah, he’s running a business or she’s running a business or they’re running a business and yeah, they’re trying to pay for their exposure so they can build up their name. Just same thing. Same thing with ghost producing.

Is it bad? Is it good? Depends on what level you’re doing it at.

[Amber D]
Again, again, that is something that I’ve had to completely separate my personal opinion and recognize that that opinion was born out of frustration. So my my new thing, my new thought on this. I mean, there is again, remembering that I didn’t come from having a very business minded attitude towards anything which does hold us back when we do feel this way or when we think in terms of it being quite, quite black and white.

So I’ve been reading a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. An old book.

[Darran]
One of my top number one ten books.

[Amber D]
It is because you reminded me so much of that book when you were just talking. And one of the main things that I took from it, some of the things I naturally was doing anyway, but in actually in conversation, but one of the really important things that I took from that was that if you’re going to sell yourself, if I talk about this in terms of being a DJ, you have to tell that person what you can offer them first. What can you do for them?

And then from that, you will be able to get what you want secondary. You know, so you’ve got to make it work for them. So I guess in a way, I’ve kind of contradicted myself when I’ve said about not wanting my students to sell tickets.

Maybe this is just because that was my background and I came from a time when we didn’t have to sell tickets. But you know what, if it’s a way in and you can do that, why the hell shouldn’t you? So, yeah, it’s a very nuanced, it’s very nuanced.

But I think what feels better for me is to not be completely opinionated on it. It feels like it sets me free a little bit just to think, well, you know, if there are ways around this where you can get a foot in the door. I mean, we’re in a different time now with social media.

There’s another guy called Fish Octagon, something or other, who’s got really, really famous really quickly here in the UK. He’s been on that Glastonbury lineups and stuff. He comes from a marketing background and he’s been doing some really, he got famous from doing some Instagram videos where he’ll play a vinyl.

He obviously has got a very, very good understanding and back catalogue of music. And then he’ll sit there in like a dressing gown, stand there in his dressing gown, eating Weetabix and talking about this particular track. And a lot of people have got really offended at the fact that he’s got so big and seemingly overtook people who’ve been in this scene for a very long time and got on all these massive lineups.

I don’t see it that way. I see it as quite inspiring that you could just get a really good idea and then run with it and then it get blown up on social media. And then the third thing as well on this is comparison is the thief of joy at the end of the day.

And no one knows your journey like you know your journey. And one thing that I found that it has actually freed me up from having these horrible thoughts about other people and comparing and you know, why aren’t I doing that? Because it’s all a less than mindset.

I want to have an abundant mindset. So I don’t see it like that. I only compare myself to former versions of myself now.

That goes for my music production. That goes for what I’m doing in my business. And I honestly feel that from that point when I stopped comparing my life with other people because you don’t know anyone else’s journey.

The whole thing has just fallen into place for me and more opportunities. I’ve seen the opportunities because I’m looking at it differently. Instead of looking at someone in a dressing gown eating wheat and bix going, oh what a dickhead.

Why is he doing that? I think all people who do something different like that first, you know, there’s an old Buddha saying first they will laugh at you. Then they will ignore you.

Then they will fight you. Then you win. And I think that’s a really good concept to think about really is to be brave and to do something a bit different.

[Darran]
I’m glad you brought that up because I was recently at an event this past weekend and I ran into a lot of people that I normally don’t see face to face because they’re about 30 miles south of where I live doing events and promotions down there. And a lot of them came up and they’re like, hey, I just want to let you know I’ve been watching you on the socials and you’ve been kicking ass lately. And I just want to say, you know, I’m really happy to see you keep going.

And there was some a little bit of drama in our city and like local scenes have from time to time. And they’re like, you’ve gotten through it. You push through it.

You’re still going headstrong going and you don’t even deal in that anymore. You’re like, yep. See you later.

I’m over here moving forward, you know, but you know, it’s just you’re right. I love what you just said that what was it first? What was it?

What is it? Nobody. I think they ignore you.

[Amber D]
First they laugh at you. First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you and they fight you and then you win.

[Darran]
Then you win. Yeah, I love that. I’m going to I’m going to transcode this episode.

I want to put that right over my mantra. Walk out the door. That is awesome.

Right there. You know, it’s so funny. We had I had a bunch of questions after this, but we got what you send over to me.

And I want to touch base on this because I want to make sure I cover the topics you wanted to talk about. You know, just not in wrapping up here, but we’re going to talk about your record labels and signing new and up and coming artists because I feel there’s a good transition point there for that. Tell us about your record labels and the artists and coming up because I do have a follow up question to that that I want to get to you.

I know we’re almost running up on that hour time zone. I want to say thank you to everybody in the chat room for before we get into this because you’ve all been there. We got Tony, Tony T-75, K, TB Greeter, Ritchie B, Sirfragmatic, Kuvelvilla, Ivan.

[Amber D]
Oh, Kuvelia.

[Darran]
Kuvelia. Yeah. Ivan Tupiu.

Ivan Tupiu. Rene SPK.

[Amber D]
Phil Mylar.

[Darran]
Yeah. Alex King, Big Kev Smith, Big Ground Jim, Bonch, Bonch, Bonch, Bossy, Bucket Face Official, Diesel, DJ Grouse Beats, DJ Max Fryer, Evil Clansman, Greg Growley, Hop Fanatic, Katie Pops, Ken Jones, Laurence Bugman, Mouskrat, Paley, Fanny Trey, Piston Gotti, Sam Davies, Sarimaco, Sharkstat Spot. I don’t know what that is.

I think I know what that is. Some Guy Called Pete, Sound Alerts, Stomping By Sound, Storm, Razor Music, Swap Music, Terrorist, Iziristo, Me, The DJ Sessions, and Twisted Glyph. Thank you all for coming into the chat room today.

[Amber D]
Definitely have this interview posted later.

[Darran]
We’re not finished up right now, because I want to get into talking about your record labels and signing you up and coming to Artists, because that’s something we always are doing here at The DJ Sessions. We’re always looking for resident DJs to be part of our program, whether you’re local or from around the world. You can join in and be part of our crew.

It’s a pretty cool program, because we like to foster growth of independent artists, even if you’re brand new and just starting out, or if you’re seasoned. We add you to the lineup, add you to the page, and help promote you through our channels as well. I did want to talk about the VR nightclub stuff with you as well, but we’re running out of time.

We’ll do it for another interview, though. We’ll save it for another day. Yeah, sure.

We’ll do another one. Record labels, signing up new artists, and up and coming artists. Do you own a record label?

[Amber D]
I own four record labels. They’re about 16 years old now. I started them many, many years ago with my distributor’s label work, so they all go on all the main download sites and everything.

Who do you work with over there? Pardon?

[Darran]
Who do you work with over there?

[Amber D]
It was Dom, but there’s also Chris. Some of them don’t work there anymore. But usually, I got in trouble for something recently, so I did actually have to speak to someone at label work.

So it was an uncleared sample in one of my songs, but they are so good at helping get things sorted out. So yeah, we’ve got it sorted out. But yeah, my labels have been going for a long time.

I have a house label called Demore Recordings, a hard house one called Delicious Recordings, a European hard trance and hardstyle one called D-Day Recordings, and I also have a trance and progressive one called Transportal Digital. I also have another one called Ambush Digital, but that’s kind of morphed into Transportal Digital now. But they’re all small independent labels, and the main reason for them was because I used to get sent and still do get sent a lot of music.

And I have had a lot of success stories. One of my early signings to Demore Recordings, Tom, he went on. He was called Disco’s Over.

He was now signed to Spin In, and I like to try to give anyone that I can hear raw talent from just their first step up the ladder. I can’t take them all the way because I’m just a small independent record label. However, what I can do is believe in them and say, look, there is something in here.

I’ll quite happily give you a contract. You know, mentally, that will make them feel like this is I can do this. I am worthy.

You know, this is something that I should pursue on, especially on a mental health level. Any kind of expressing yourself, you know, through music is such a an important thing to do. And so that’s kind of like carried on now through a show that we do usually on a Tuesday called the Demo Drop.

So the Demo Drop we do on Twitch. And the Demo Drop is free for anyone to submit a track in, has to be their own work. And we will listen to that track together.

And I will give feedback or have guest DJs or guest music producers on to also give some feedback. A lot of the time, the tracks have got signed to either one of my labels or one of my friends who will be in the chat as well, who also run their record labels. People have started to collab with each other.

It’s a great place for like-minded individuals to come together every Tuesday. And we geek out about plugins, the latest VSTs we’re using, certain methods that we might be using in our music production, anything really, and mainly about the philosophy of music production. So, you know, it can be quite a lonely thing to do because you’re in a studio or you’re in your room or you’ve got your headphones on, however you’re making music, on your own for a long time.

And it can be a wonderful place. But then also, you know, we have the trials and tribulations of balancing work and family life, you know, so we can kind of like, we talk about that aspect of it. And, you know, it’s just a nice place for people to be able to come and chat.

And I like to think that the demo drop helps to get people ready to send their music to bigger record labels because they can make a lot of their mistakes with me. So a lot of the time, people will send WeTransfer links that will expire within seven days. I’m like, don’t do that because if you did that to a label, they’re not going to come and chase you.

You know, make sure you label your files correctly. I’m not going to know. You might have a track called Mysterious Ocean, version two, master, final, final.

If you’ve not got your name on that, you know, or no metadata, we can’t trace it back to you. So many, many times people have made those mistakes on my show. And I would much rather them do that and learn how to then approach a bigger or proper radio record label so that they don’t have a misconception of, you know, it’s my fault.

I’ve not done this. You know, no one cares about my music or whatever. And my one rule that I have is that I always, always respond to every email, which does mean that it takes three to four weeks for me to get to their actual email.

But if it’s not ready, I’ll always give them helpful feedback and constructive feedback on what to do to get it listenable, at least, you know, and that very rarely happens. It’s amazing, actually, how many people you get who send in tracks to the demo drop who are so good at what they do, but they just don’t know it because no one’s told them.

[Darran]
I’m so glad you brought that up because one of the largest, one of the things we’ve been toying with the idea. I’ve actually been in talks for this for almost three and a half years. I just got a phone, my UK rep today, and he’s been working with me on this in the back end.

You brought up Labelworks earlier, and we’re working with Tony, Tony R. Tony, I can’t pronounce his last name right now. But Tony was, you know, when we launch our label here at the DJ sessions, we’re going to be going with Labelworks as well.

And we’re already all set up and ready to work with that fam over there. We’re going to do some collaborations with them when we were over at ADE, our first time in 2022 and stuff. But that being said is, you know, when you’re running the label, the one thing that I’m still trying to wrap my head around is you just talked about what you said that was awesome is the submission process.

And I don’t know if we want to open our door and say, we’re only producing tracks for our internal resident DJs, producers, or do I open up that door to the floodgate of taking submissions? And then what is that? Who’s going to go through all the submissions?

You know, each one of those, if I had, I’m just predicting if I have 450 emails, if I don’t touch my computer for a day or two, I have 450 emails in there. That’s business stuff. That’s not submission.

That’s what happens with mine as well. If I’m not on top of it, I’m taking care of it. Even if I have an assistant that can sort through all that and clear out all the gunky gunk, you know, and we might say, oh, we only want to take house music submissions or we only want tech out or this is what we’re looking for or label and have different emails for different genres.

People still will submit drum and bass tracks to the house email. Just try to get in front of our face. It’s like, yeah, you know, so, you know, I’m very curious as how, you know, when you bring that on board, what kind of doors is that?

What kind of can of worms is that going to open? You know, and then are they going to go to your socials?

[Amber D]
And it goes, well, it won’t be as bad as you think. I mean, the thing, one of the things that I will always do now that I know that you’re looking for submissions, I like, I will, I will make sure that I’ll send them over to you. You know, if there’s anything that I think is specifically good, like I say, like I don’t pick the ones that I really like just for my label.

I, I might have like the first one, but I want them to grow. This is an integral part of who I am in my soul that I want to see. I get such enjoyment out of seeing people grow and go and get bigger and bigger and more successful.

So it’s in my interest to take the people who come to this show. And if there is anything that I think would be relative for whatever the genres are, I will send them in your direction. A hundred percent.

[Darran]
Awesome. Thank you so much on that. We haven’t launched yet.

Our whole website is actually, people don’t know this, it’s designed to be a whole label artist promotion, song promotion, sale site on the backend. That’s like version 3.3 that should be coming out. It’s been like, we had to get the website.

[Amber D]
3.3 final, final, final.

[Darran]
No, it’s yeah, it’s like, no, we had version one. You can go back in the Wayback Machine and actually type in the djsessions.com, see our domain and go all the way back to 2013 and see our first version of the website in 2013. Wow.

Then get up to 2018, right when we were getting approved to move from our platforms over to Twitch. And I was sitting there in 2018 and I had the site working the way I wanted to, but you’d still look at it and go, and then in 2021, 2022, I spent about three and a half months building the website that we have now. And I say, the website we have now is like the Ferrari, the Lamborghini website.

[Amber D]
I love your website.

[Darran]
It’s awesome. And then, you know, going backwards, it was like the Honda Accord. And before that, it was like that old Mini Cooper that you’re never going to drive or ever show anyone.

It’s like from 1962. It’s like, oh, this is just- With no power steering. Yeah, no power.

It’s the get us to point A and B and that’s it. With Java. Yeah, basically almost.

But, you know, just the progression of seeing that over time, like you said, seeing people progress, that’s one of the things that goes back to the founding core principles of ITV or even Phantasmagoria was we were supposed to be a place people could stop off. If you look at it from this perspective, they get involved with us, whether it’s an artist at your level and it’s like, hey, here’s something else I’m doing to help benefit my career. Or somebody can join and work with us and use this as like a stepping stone and put that feather in their stocking and put that on their resume saying, I worked with this company.

I went on and I learned a lot of stuff to help me move on. And just like you said, to see somebody go boom and blow up, you know, it’s like, yeah, it’s not like I use this example. Sandra Van Dorn was on our couch years ago when I was doing ITV Nightlight, just starting up.

Brand new artist. Now he’s like, Sandra Van Dorn, we didn’t make his career, but we were still out there capturing and talking to the people that were new in the scene that ended up becoming sensations and being big. And it’s like, whoa, you graced our couch.

Thank you. Now I try to get an interview with him and they’re like, I actually had a, I was going to have an interview with him when he was just here in Seattle, but timing didn’t work out. But those kinds of things are, you know, it’s just, that’s kind of one of the founding principles of the DJ sessions.

It’s not, we’re just trying to feature, I won’t strike down another show, but they’re a pretty prominently well-known show that everyone knows about. And they seem to only feature known artists. And I get it from a business perspective, that’s their business model.

They don’t focus on independent artists, which is so ironic that it wouldn’t be that hard for them to make a second channel that says indie artists, not Signtown and put them on and give them exposure to get them to that next step. Or they don’t even do interviews with the DJs that are on their show.

[Amber D]
So it’s an intentions thing, isn’t it? At the end of the day, and people will be able to see through that quite clearly. You know, it’s, and it’s, you know what it’s like.

There’s a lot of gatekeeping in this industry, but it’s, it’s just a side of the industry. We find our peeps, you know, we find the people that we get on with and we honestly, that that’s so much more growth in that. And it’s more sense of achievement in a personal way as well, you know, because as much as these other things can blow up and be massive, it can quite easily, because it’s, it’s, it’s made in an egotistical kind of a way.

They’ll quite easily just move away as soon as the money’s gone. You know, we see this a lot with the whole business techno thing, you know, EDM, you know, and, and everything being bought by these massive corporate, all the events and stuff. I’ve seen it.

I’ve been doing this for 24 years now. I’ve seen individuals come in when the money’s there and, you know, that’s fine, but they just go again as soon as it goes elsewhere, you know, it’s just, it’s cool. But you, you’ve just got to find where your peeps are and, you know, other people will gravitate towards that as well.

[Darran]
Absolutely. The one question I wanted to ask you too, about your labels is what is the most, and I think you kind of really did cover it a little bit, but not directly, but what is the most important thing that record labels should be doing for their artists and out there on a whole, as a whole collective of record labels, are they doing a good job with that?

[Amber D]
Hmm. I think it depends on if the record label’s got enough budget. So for mine, mine’s really small.

So I have enough to be able to make a big fuss of the artist on my socials. I’ll make like a few posts about it, you know, so really my main thing is just to, on an individual basis is to get them excited about the fact that they should be, you know, taking this further and, and, you know, giving them that initial, yes, I believe in you kind of a thing. So the step up from that would be, I think that record labels need to start investing in artists more.

Like when I first started, I got assigned to one of the biggest record labels in the world at the time, Tidy Tracks, and became a Tidy Girl. And they gave me a contract for 10 years and they built me up and they nurtured me. They put me on lineups.

I was on the front covers of magazines. I was doing an essential mix live on Radio 1 to millions and millions, tens of millions of people. All of that was done through the, the record label.

And then fortunately, I think what happens, these are all, I know what happens is no one kind of will touch you with a barge pole if you don’t already have, and they quite blatantly say this, at least like 20,000 followers on Instagram, you need to have done a lot of the groundwork. And we know how that ends up fueling follower bots and, you know, changing the numbers in underhand ways. But again, that goes back into what we were saying before about, you know, it all comes down, I guess, to someone’s personal morals, whether they think that’s good or bad, or, you know, whether they would do it or not.

Personally, I would never do that. But I know that there are lots of people who have, and because they’re being told that this is the only way that they’re going to be taken seriously. But I do see that changing now.

So we used to have a whole thing about influences, macro influences, and now that’s changed into like more micro influences. So what we used to call word of mouth, you know, and I do feel that everything is kind of entropy. So it’s chaos theory.

Everything gets really fucked up. Everything just goes really mental. All of it is so up in the air right now in terms of like why people are, you know, big and what got them there.

And people are told what they like and, you know, not really listening, you know. But if you create enough false idols, eventually people will get sickened with it. And that’s how I see the entropy of it, where people will eventually go back to listening with their own ears and following someone who’s maybe not, you know, the top of a billboard.

Someone that’s actually probably more attainable. Someone who’s like more interactive with them. Someone that is not, that they need to be putting on a pedestal.

And that’s kept me in a business for 24 years by having a fiercely loyal fan base. A fiercely loyal. I’ve had people name their children after me, have tattoos of my logos and my face, you know.

And you don’t get that from something that wasn’t built on integrity, I don’t think.

[Darran]
Absolutely. No, I can totally understand that. Like I was saying, I talked to a lot of people, even somebody I started in this game with 30 plus years ago.

People that don’t understand the use of technology, where it shifted. Like you said, it’s now the new word of mouth. And even for bookings or people taking you seriously, you have to have that engagement.

You have to have those followers. Otherwise, they’re like, why are we going to mess with you? You’re not taking your career seriously.

It’s like, I want to be a race car driver, but I want you to fund the whole F1 racer for me. You don’t want to put any of your investment money into this at all. This car costs $5 million to build and the pit crew and all this stuff to put it together.

And you want it just for free because you say, I want to drive. Do you even have any driving skills? Can you even drive?

Well, no, but I want to be popular. I want to be the number one F1 racer in the world. Okay, you have money to take.

I think you see where I’m getting at there.

[Amber D]
Yeah, be careful what you wish for as well. That’s what I see a lot of with people who’ve kind of jumped the gun maybe a little bit. Probably sometimes for no fault of their own because who wouldn’t want to be on the top of a billboard for whatever reason.

But if you do that and you’re not prepared for it, I see a lot of mental health issues happen with people. A lot of, I mean, we only had to look at what happened to Avicii. And that wasn’t that long ago.

It can be really hard out there. So really be careful what you wish for. I think the whole just growing into it organically for me personally, I really feel that that is the best way to do it because you can take it as slowly as you want to, you can build on that.

But having some of those opportunities presented to you as well is obviously important. But some of it can just be pure luck as well. But then the main thing to remember is do not be disheartened.

Don’t just look at what you see on Instagram and assume that this is real. What you’ll see in there is marketing, plain and simple. And you don’t know what is going on in someone else’s life.

You don’t know what happens as soon as that pitch has been taken. It could all just be a set. I’m sure that there’s actually places where you can pretend you’re in a plane, a private plane and it’s actually on a set.

[Darran]
They have them.

[Amber D]
Yeah, exactly. It’s not what you think it is, but please don’t get depressed about that. Do not be disheartened.

Just continue to do what you do. And make sure you come and see the demo drop as well if you are an artist and get involved in more grassroots kind of organisations and streams and just channels which are a bit smaller size that we can give you some actual real attention. There is a lovely Goldilocks kind of area of viewership, isn’t there?

And then after that, it just becomes far too much. No one can actually read the chat. You can’t have these kind of one-to-one conversations with each other.

So it can be in our interest sometimes to not worry about having all of the attention. Just do your thing.

[Darran]
Yeah, I’m glad you said all that. One of the things I had and we’re going to kind of wrap it up here quickly. I got a couple more questions for you.

Somebody, I was doing a show once. This is like early Pandy and they ran. I like calling it Pandy by the way.

That’s my nickname for it. They ran up onto me in the middle of the show out of nowhere. I’ve never seen this person ever come to one of my shows before.

We’re streaming live. We’re out of the park and he runs up on me. He goes, so Darran, what’s the secret of you getting so many viewers on Twitch?

I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, well, there’s no way you could get that many viewers on Twitch. I go, dude, I’ve been doing my show for 10 years.

I put stuff in social forums. I don’t know where this comes from. He goes, well, it might look like somebody’s buying bots for your channel.

I go, well, I’m not doing that. And even so, I can’t stop anyone from doing that. If somebody wanted to go out and let’s say that Twitch, I love you.

I’m not saying anything bad about your payout practices, but if I’m on a partner program and somebody knows that partner program pays me 60, 40, 70, 30, whatever it is, even as an affiliate, it’s 50, 50. If somebody goes out there and says, hey, I could give Darran five bucks on a subscription on Twitch. Darran’s going to get 250 of that.

Twitch is going to get 250 of that. But I could go out to Instagram and for five bucks, I could add 2000 followers to his account and help him promote him, market him that way. I’m going to help that out.

Or I’m going to spend 10 bucks and I’m going to bump his viewership up over here and bought his channel. There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s ways you can kind of turn it off, but you really can’t.

And it’s like you have no control over that.

[Amber D]
No, I had that happen literally last week.

[Darran]
You know, or if people can get creative. I stay on top of this stuff, so I know this knowledge. Yeah.

I don’t use it, but I know this knowledge. And there was a channel out there that you could create a bot chatroom and you put a bunch of shit talking in it. Pay for it and then send it to the channel and would have all these people start shit talking in the channel.

[Amber D]
We do that organically in my chat. In fact, I do most of the shit talking.

[Darran]
Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, but I mean, and so the company went to a model where you’d have to submit your chat and then have to look through it, read through it, and then they’d approve it in order for you to chat. But that being said, you have the, I think in the, what do they call it in the gaming world, swatting. Have you ever heard of that term?

[Amber D]
Yeah, yeah, I have, yeah.

[Darran]
And so, you know, you have that kind of, like you said, they hate you, then you win, you know, and you’re at that level that’s going on. But if you don’t have a mod in your chatroom, watch what’s going on. That’s why I turn my, my rooms right now are emoji con only, you know, and it’s like, that’s because I don’t have time when I’m doing a show like this to be tapping and answering chat.

I’m watching your chatroom blow up. You’re not typing and talking to people.

[Amber D]
We’ve got a good curated amount of people. We, we, we’d naturally, we hardly get any crap in our channel at all because I think mainly I just know how to deal with it. And, and the, the, they probably think we’re too weird for them anyway.

So it’s not really an issue.

[Darran]
Yeah. Well, you know, Amber, I have had a great time talking with you. Like I said, I have so much more I want to talk with you about, but we got to wrap it up here.

Last couple of questions here though. If somebody were to write a biography about you, what do you think the title should be?

[Amber D]
Oh my God. The title of my biography. Um, maybe my, my chat should, uh, should say it, whatever they think it should be.

I don’t know. I wonder, cause I’m just thinking obituary things now. Um, life of the D.

[Darran]
Life of the D?

[Amber D]
Yeah. That’s it. Cause my, my second name being D, Amber D pretending to be normal.

I like that. Yeah. Yeah.

[Darran]
Pretending to be normal.

[Amber D]
Yeah.

[Darran]
You’re weird. No, you’re weird. Yeah.

All right. And that one, I like that one. Renee SDK, Tony T75.

I was going to say Grouse Beats. I was going to go with the doctor’s in or Dr. D. Awesome.

Now we do have an exclusive mix coming from you as well that you sent over. Thank you so much for that. Super excited to get that up on our site.

Is there anything else you want to let our DJ sessions fans know about before we let go? Or your own fans know for that case, for that matter.

[Amber D]
Um, just that I love them very much. Um, and just, yeah, make sure you come and see me on my streams. If you are someone that’s not been on one of the streams yet, you’re very, very welcome.

We also have an awesome discord. Um, for anyone that ever wants to talk about anything mental health related, like I said before, I’m a fully qualified mental health first aider. And, you know, it’s, it’s, we use a lot of humor in the chat for those kinds of things, but we have a great discord for anyone that would, you know, wants to just have a bit of a, a chat off screen.

You know, I wouldn’t want people to think that, you know, it’s only when I’m streaming that you can talk to me. Um, so I’m always available and I’m always, I always have time for your art. So make sure you send me your music in.

Um, and yeah, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me Darran.

[Darran]
Absolutely Amber. No, we’re going to definitely follow up with you. It’s been too long.

My hiatus was needed, but I’m back in the mix now on Aviak. And we will follow up with you. We try to stay in touch with everyone every six months, maybe sometimes shorter than that.

Have you on the series again? I’ve had a great time. Like I said, I’ve, I’ve got so much more I wanted to chat with you about, but I probably have an hour long.

We’ve got to go a little bit past that. No big deal there. Um, but where’s the best place people can go to find out information about you?

[Amber D]
So just make sure you go to make sure you come to my Twitch, obviously, but you can just put in, if you just put into Google Amber D, DJ Amber D, everything will come up. I would advise that you go onto my SoundCloud as well. There’s a lot of free track downloads on there.

Um, and yeah, or my Facebook, if you’re on the Facebook, but I’m pretty, um, I’m, I’m pretty much always online. So if you send me a message on any of those things, if you want to talk to me about anything also as well, I do private tutoring as well. And for music production and DJing, and I also have my private online Facebook DJ group, which has, I think I have over 200 students now.

Um, and that’s still only 40 pounds to join for lifetime membership. And there’s like about 34 tutorials or like in a video and also PDF files. Um, and I also run loads of competitions so you can win opportunities to be on my radio show on 97.8 FM, LDC radio to thousands of people. And also you might win an opportunity to come to my studio and do a stream here. Um, and yeah, it’s just a nice group of people to, to be able to rely on if you’ve got any questions and queries to do with music production and, and DJing. So yeah, that’s about it.

[Darran]
That is awesome. Amber, again, thank you so much. Got your SoundCloud up there.

We’re going to drop that Twitch one more time. There’s the Twitch address right there. Check out djamber underscore D and dj-amber-d on SoundCloud.

[Amber D]
And to my guys as well. Make sure you all please follow Darran in the DJ sessions, please.

[Darran]
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I appreciate that as well. Got a lot of content coming out here and a lot of stuff and got that exclusive mix that’ll be going up to the site here soon. We’ll get that all up there.

And again, Amber, thank you for coming on the show this afternoon. Wait, it’s evening for you. It’s afternoon for me.

[Amber D]
Yep.

[Darran]
Oh, awesome. All right. Well, you know what?

On that note, don’t forget to go to our website, the djsessions.com. Find us on, or go to our website. All of our socials are there.

That’s at the djsessions.com. We have exclusive interviews, live interviews. We have exclusive mixes, over 600 news stories a month go there.

The socials are there. You can go to the Apple store, subscribe to our shows, have them automatically downloaded to your computer. We got our mobile app there.

We have our VR nightclub and VR chat, which is awesome. We’re going to have more content being released there as well and more. And all of that is at the djsessions.com.

Use the QR code. Boo! We all know how to use those now.

People thought I was crazy when I talked about QR codes years ago, going, this is going to revolutionize the world. And people were like, crazy, dude. What are you talking about?

What do I do? What do you mean point my phone at this and take a picture? See how easy that is?

You don’t have to type in anything. And so I love QR codes. All of that and more for our site is thedjsessions.com.

I’m your host, Darran. And that’s Amber D coming in from, where is it again? Doncaster.

Doncaster. Doncaster, UK. The DJ Sessions presents The Virtual Sessions.

And remember, on The DJ Sessions, music never stops.