Jungstedt – Groovy Disco Revival and Swedish Music Roots on the Virtual Sessions 10/13/25

Coming from Stockholm, Sweden, Jungstedt brings an energetic, groovy, and soulful approach to new disco and house music. His musical journey began in the late 90s, inspired by hip-hop culture, when he and his friends bought DJ gear with their summer job savings and started performing at house parties around Stockholm. Those grassroots beginnings evolved into professional gigs and eventually full-scale music production, marking the start of a lifelong passion for sound and creativity.

 

Jungstedt’s first production experiments took shape using Fruity Loops and Reason, before releasing his debut track Barracus in 2009. After years of refining his craft, he teamed up with Sticky Decks and Disco Tron to form a production alliance focused on new disco. Their covers of classics like Whitney Houston’s How Will I Know and Enoja’s Enjoy Your Life have gained global traction through Tasty Recordings, solidifying their reputation for reimagining timeless hits with a modern disco flair.

 

Outside the studio, Jungstedt balances his creative life with fitness and family, maintaining a strict daily workout routine and an active lifestyle that includes following his favorite football team, Djurgårdens IF. He emphasizes the importance of discipline, loyalty, and collaboration—both in music and life.

 

Jungstedt remains dedicated to the artistry of performance, favoring intimate venues where he can connect directly with the crowd. His philosophy on success focuses on passion over profit, valuing creative fulfillment and the joy of sharing music above all else. With his vibrant sound and deep-rooted influences, Jungstedt continues to bring groove, warmth, and positivity to dance floors across Sweden and beyond.

Topics

0:16 – Early beginnings in Stockholm and hip-hop influences
5:28 – Learning Fruity Loops and early production experiments
8:42 – Transition from hip-hop DJing to house and disco
10:39 – Teaming up with Sticky Decks and Disco Tron for new disco projects
13:32 – The making of How Will I Know and Enjoy Your Life covers
17:46 – The long process of finishing their first Tasty Recordings release
20:18 – Fitness routines and staying balanced with daily exercise
25:41 – Football fandom and following Djurgårdens IF
33:59 – Reflections on Defected, Glitterbox, and label loyalty
48:07 – Opinions on phones in clubs and preserving the live music experience

Connect with Jungstedt

Website: jungstedtmusic.com

Instagram: @jungstedtmusic

[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 and coming in all the way from Stockholm, Sweden. Today we have Jungstedtt in the studio with us.

How you doing today?

[Jungstedt]
I’m doing great, thank you Darran.

[Darran]
Absolutely, thank you for being here today. It’s an awesome, wonderful day here in Seattle and you said it was a little bit chilly over there in Stockholm today.

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, for sure. It’s about eight degrees Celsius, so it’s very cold. The autumn has arrived.

[Darran]
You know, I’ve been in that area of the world a couple times over at Amsterdam 2022-2023 for ADE. I was in Berlin last year. Oh, that was more in the summer time in August.

But you know, I like the weather over there. It’s kind of reminding me back at home, you know. It’s not always sunny here, it’s not tropical weather in Seattle, but it definitely had that same Seattle vibe, feel to it.

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, I like the seasons. Like, we had a good summer this year and now the autumn is here, so I like it.

[Darran]
Yeah, that’s the one thing we get in Seattle is the four different seasons. I mean, actual real… well, a lot of it has a lot of rain that goes with it, but we still get the four seasons here.

But enough about Seattle and the weather in Stockholm. You know, you’re here on the DJ session today. Thank you for being here.

Got a lot to go over, a lot of questions to ask. If you could describe your music that you produce in three words and that you play, how would you describe that in three words? I would say new disco.

[Jungstedt]
I would say groovy. Is that the word? Yeah.

And the third word I would say is, what’s the word I’m looking for? I would say energetic, if that’s the English word.

[Darran]
Yeah. Yeah. New disco, groovy and energetic.

I’m a huge disco fan myself, being born in the 70s. I love disco music, going back to the original house, of course, transcending later on into house music in my electronic music soiree of partying and going out and stuff. I love house music, but new disco is a fun one.

Heard it a lot. Heard it’s coming out. It’s a rising genre.

You know, what was basically your strongest motivation, though, to pursue a career in music?

[Jungstedt]
That’s a good question. I started in high school. We started to listen to hip hop and started to be interested in all four elements of hip hop, excluding graffiti.

That wasn’t interesting, but we bought DJ equipment for money that we earned from summer jobs and we started playing at home. Later, we got requests from house parties in Stockholm to play them, and I loved it. It later became a job and a profession.

We put up posters all around Stockholm. You can hire us. We got a lot of gigs during the later years of high school.

The rest is history. You can say that.

[Darran]
You kind of self-started, promo your own kind of stuff. Obviously, a lot of independent artists have to do that when they’re just starting out to knock on doors and let people know. When did you start all this and your team?

[Jungstedt]
I think in 1998 or 1999, we bought equipment, me and two friends. So, that’s when it all started getting serious. I really liked it from the start.

It was really fun to just play records that you love. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

No, no. Sorry. I was a hip hop head in the 90s, so I really liked Nas and Dr. Dre and all that. In the beginning, I only played hip hop.

[Darran]
Mm-hmm.

[Jungstedt]
Yeah. What was your question?

[Darran]
I was going to say, do you remember the first record, the first album you ever bought? Is it embarrassing or was it awesome?

[Jungstedt]
I would say the first album that I remember is the Fugees, The Score. That was my favorite album for many, many years. Later, I got to play with Wyclef and the Fugees.

It was really like destiny that I bought that album because a few years after that, I had the chance to play with the Fugees. That’s another story. But that’s my favorite album of all time, I would say.

Nice.

[Darran]
Yeah, I had the opportunity around that same time frame when The Score album had come out. I went to one of their shows here in Seattle. I was working with a hip hop television show at the time called The Cool Out Network.

I was on and off with that show for years, for about eight years before launching my own career. I got to meet the group, but I remember meeting Lauryn Hill. First of all, she is very, very intimidatingly, amazingly awesome, beautiful.

I’ll never forget, I went to go shake her hand or say hi. That was amazing. She’s like, oh little man, you’re so cute, you’re so sweet.

I was like, little fan crush for a moment. She was just really awesome. The show was phenomenal.

Definitely remember that. I wouldn’t use the term, I don’t think I broke the tape in my car, but probably was definitely in heavy rotation in the stereo of my car when we were driving around. I had a big black Cadillac with two 15s in the back, so it hit and people knew I was coming down the block.

You also produce your own tracks as well now. Did you start that back in 98, 99 or is that a progression that you went from DJing and then started producing music?

[Jungstedt]
No, we started playing with the program was called Fruit Loops. We just started playing with it. We tried to produce hip hop tracks, but I don’t want to hear my tracks from the 90s.

We just played. Then I took a course in music production in the later years of high school. We did some hip hop tracks.

We really tried, but later I bought Reason. Do you know the music production program Reason? We played with that as well.

Then I got bored and some years went and in 2009, I released my first Spotify track, which was more of a progressive house track. It’s called Barracus and it’s still there, but that was the only track until 2021. It’s been a journey.

Definitely.

[Darran]
I remember playing with Fruity Loops 3 back in the early 2000s. I had it on the laptop and I was like, this is really cool. Then I ended up getting two pieces of Roland gear, MC-505 and SP-808.

That was just for fun, but I go to my friend’s house and wouldn’t necessarily be making hip hop beats and stuff like that, but definitely playing around with the knobs and turning everything in real time. It wasn’t necessarily analog gear, but it wasn’t using a computer, but it was using the gear itself. That was fun because one was a sequencer, one was a sampler, and I always thought that was really fun to play with.

I grew up in a musical family. My brothers were musicians, so I grew up playing with keyboards and rack mounts and eight tracks, four tracks, all that kind of stuff for home studio. It felt natural for me to have that kind of gear.

I’ll play with this and I’ll dive right in and use it, but obviously computers got into software later on. I started working for Apple and was able to be a person that could train people how to use the Apple high-end software like Final Cut Pro or Logic, not to make music or make movies, how to use the software. My songs, I probably would never want to release out there to the world.

They’re more for fun. When you’re making tracks, what is your inspiration for coming up with the names for your tracks? How do you decide on that?

[Jungstedt]
That’s an interesting question. Our first track is called, our first track on the new disco label Taste Recording, You Got, and that’s because the song contains only two phrases. That’s, you got what I want, you got what I need.

That’s the only vocal. So the name became You Got, for obvious reasons. The second single is Enjoy Your Life, and it’s a cover of Eonya, the Nigerian singer from the 70s.

Her track Enjoy Your Life, so the track is Enjoy Your Life. We don’t put a lot of effort in the names, but my recent track is How Will I Know, which is a cover from Whitney Houston, and the song How Will I Know. So the process of picking names are not really that hard for us.

[Darran]
Do you ever release, or do you ever produce music completely outside of your own genre that never gets released?

[Jungstedt]
Not at the moment, but I really would like to try to make some hip hop songs that would never get released, because it’s out of my genre, and I’m too old, I think, for being a hip hop dad. I would try to make some Swedish hip hop, but we will see.

[Darran]
What’s the longest time you’ve ever spent consecutively in the studio working on a track?

[Jungstedt]
I would say the first track we made on Tasty Recordings, my co-partner Martin Larson, aka Sticky Decks. He was never satisfied with the production, so it took like six months or something, and he was never pleased, and I was so furious. I just wanted to release it, but he always said, no, we gotta work on this, we gotta work on that, and that was the longest time.

Now we work a lot more faster with the tracks. When we start, it takes a couple of weeks, and we are off.

[Darran]
Working on tracks, it takes a lot of time sitting behind the computers and putting this together, you know, making sure everything is right. What do you do in your free time? How do you stay fit in doing all that, spending so much time behind the computer?

You mentioned you had a kid, so I’m sure that keeps you pretty active there.

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, it keeps me active, and I try to work out on my balcony. I have a balcony system for my workouts, because I don’t like gyms. There are a lot of people in the gyms, and I like to work out alone, so I have my equipment on the balcony.

I do that. I have an everyday system, so I have something every day, and I’ve been doing it for two years now, so it’s just something every day. It’s maybe some push-ups.

I work with weights a little bit, but the everyday system works for me. It’s like keeping me a little bit in shape.

[Darran]
I can relate to that. I recently just picked up a VR program, and I get in there and try to do at least 12 to 15 minutes. I’m just warming up at this.

Let’s see if I can do something 12 to 15 minutes a day, and I find out very quickly how out of shape my body is. Oh, that’s going to hurt, but you’ve got to stay in shape. I actually had my dad’s birthday dinner last night with my friend, and she was talking about over the age of 30, you start to lose muscle mass.

You start to lose bone mass. If you don’t do something to keep that up, you’re going to turn 60, 70 years old and not have anything, and you can’t build with that. You have to stay in shape and stay in fit, and it definitely keeps you probably mentally healthy as well.

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, but it’s not that hard if you do five minutes a day with something or maybe 10 minutes or 15 minutes, but I do maybe five minutes a day, I would say. I’ve been gaining some muscle mass for the past two years, I would say. That’s nice.

[Darran]
In addition to working out when you’re taking a break from music and all that, what else do you enjoy doing outside of being in the studio, producing tracks and working out?

[Jungstedt]
I would say I’m a big, big soccer fan, as you say in the US, football fan, I would say in Europe, but I support my team, Hugh Gordon’s EF in every way I can, and it’s a big part of my life, I would say. I go to the home games, I watch the away games, and I think about my team like 27, I would say.

[Darran]
We’re pretty excited we have the World Cup coming to Seattle here next year.

[Jungstedt]
Oh, amazing. Sweden are losing. What?

Sweden, the national team of Sweden are not going so well, so I don’t know if we are going to be there, but we will see.

[Darran]
Yeah, it’s going to be exciting. We’re expecting that they say there’s going to be about 750,000 people coming in over that six-week period. I mean, that’s pretty much half of the population of the greater Seattle area, which is kind of crazy.

It’s going to be pretty nuts. If it doesn’t get moved to Canada, okay. I won’t go into that discussion right now, but I’ve seen the things people might be looking to move it to another country, which is a bummer, but hoping that doesn’t happen.

Back to the music. Do you look at record labels out there? You’ve got Tasty Recordings, correct?

Yeah, from England. Outside of Tasty, what top five record labels are out there? Do you say, oh, this one, this one, this one, this one.

I really love their selection or love what they’re pushing out there. Do you have a top five that you could let our audience know about, our fans know about?

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, but I like to stay loyal. I can say Defected, Glitterbox is labels that I really enjoy. They’re coming to Sweden in November, so I’m going to go there, hopefully.

Defected, Glitterbox and what else? We have a lot of big labels in Sweden as well, but really, I like the idea of staying loyal to one label. We only released on Tasty or New Disco Tracks, so we’re going with that at the moment.

I really like their style and the owner, Martin Thomas, I have a really good connection with him. He lives in Manchester and I can always talk to him about our releases and we work really good together. So I’m not going to cheat on him in the next coming years, I think.

You’re not going to what? I’m not going to cheat on him, Martin Thomas.

[Darran]
Gotcha.

[Jungstedt]
No, no, no, no, no, no.

[Darran]
I hear you, I hear you.

[Jungstedt]
I like a lot of labels. Yeah.

[Darran]
Being in the industry, I get to listen to a lot of music and a lot of players, a lot of people, whether they’re independent artists or they’re with a major label out there. Some of the fun stuff I get to do in the back end of the show, just being in electronic music. We’ve talked about the idea of opening up a label here at the DJ sessions ourselves.

Oh, nice. We’ve realized a few years back that that could become its own business in itself. I’m already wearing 14 to 20 different hats with a team of help that’s out there, about another 14, 15 people making all this really happen.

And so basically, adding a label onto all this, we’d be like, ah. But what we are launching, and we’re excited to let people know about this, is we are launching a new music section on our site. Not a store, a section.

So when an artist comes on the show, we can say, hey, would you like to put your tracks up on our section? Helping to promote them even further. If they are doing that, or if it’s a label, we can give them an artist page, label page, and people can find their music.

We’re also adding an internet station to our site right now, which we’re very excited to do here once we fill that music section up. And then we’re also going to be syndicating content as well, whether they’re audio shows or video live streaming shows. So we have a lot of stuff going on over here at DJ Sessions.

I always like to find out who’s what, and who’s talking about what. You mentioned Defected in there. We have a partnership we’re looking at forging with somebody who was working with Defected for a number of years.

Can’t drop that out there yet, but we’re super excited about that partnership coming about. And the years of industry knowledge they’re bringing to the table. So yeah, you mentioned Defected, I’m like ding, ding, ding.

Yeah, very awesome stuff. You know, do you listen to any other radio shows, internet shows, podcasts, live streams?

[Jungstedt]
I listen to some Swedish live streams, especially during the pandemic. I was really into listening to live streams. It became a big thing during the pandemic.

It’s a little bit more quiet on that part the last couple of years. But I got really interested in the DJ Sessions now that you contacted me. So I will listen more now.

[Darran]
I appreciate that. Thank you very much. We have a lot of stuff coming out on our end.

We’re going through kind of a Phoenix rising out of the ashes story right now. I took an eight and a half month hiatus off from August of last year to about May of this year. And now I’ve come back and we’ve kind of just retweaked the brand a little bit more and gearing up with a lot more amazing partnerships internationally, nationally, that we’re really excited to be bringing more to the table for artists and taking the brand and developing things that should have been there with our website that were built into our website in the beginning.

But now I’m actually getting to use them like the music section, the radio player, the section, and then they’re syndicating the show. So thank you very much for following us. Yeah, I did see obviously it was very interesting in 2020 when doing an online show for about 11 years and we were just getting ready to launch and push our show out there again, almost what we’re doing right now, watching everybody in the world jump online and start doing a show or start doing a podcast.

And I sat there, I was like, well, gosh, I had a DJ show. I’m not a DJ. I’m not a producer.

I’m the interviewer. I’m the executive producer. But watching everyone jump online and I’m like, I knew I had been in the industry already for 20 years, plus at that point.

So going back and looking at it and saying, okay, y’all are starting up the shows, but you don’t have the infrastructure of what’s going to go on to continue this. And one of the things I’d say is let’s see what happens when everything opens back up. There was a huge rise, 300% uptick in live streams.

Podcasts are about the same. And then all of a sudden everyone just went, and it’s like, they stopped either. They could say, oh, it was too hard.

I had no viewers. It’s like, yeah, but it takes time to build that. It doesn’t just happen overnight.

And then it’s like saying, I’m going to open up a store or a restaurant or something when there’s 8 million other restaurants and stores opening up right next door to you. And a person only has so much money, they can shop at one store or it can only be in one store at a time. And if you’re hours of open, or when the other people are open, how are people going to know?

And it was just a whole big technological interesting gap. But what it did was it made it very… I would come to people and say, oh, I do a live streaming DJ show on Twitch.

And people would say, who would want to watch a DJ online? And I’d be like, okay, have you ever listened to a radio show before? You’re listening to a DJ play.

And I’d say, okay, they’d go, what’s Twitch? And I’d be like, okay, you know that thing called YouTube? It’s owned by Google.

Well, Twitch is live streaming, but pretty much backed by Amazon. And like, oh, past 2020, now people go, oh, a DJ show. Oh, okay, cool.

I get it. Oh, Twitch. I know about Twitch.

My kid streams his video games on Twitch or does all that fun stuff. So it kind of helped us boost us and really, in a sense, worldwide show that live streaming was a viable medium in the music community, or even in the DJ electronic music world, too. So thank you for following us.

And yeah, I support and help anyone that wants to ever get into doing that. And obviously with our platform, it isn’t just about us and DJs. It’s about you and your fans and putting content out there so people can find more artists.

And I really love doing that. It’s kind of our mission statement behind what we do. Speaking of spending all that time on our end, I’ve met a lot of people in the industry.

You’ve met some people in the industry as well. Who’s the most inspiring person you’ve ever met backstage? And tell our viewers why that person was such an inspiration to you.

[Jungstedt]
I would say when I played with Joachim Garot, French pronunciation, Joachim Garot. I was a resident DJ at Café Opera in Stockholm and he played and it was such an eye opener what you can do behind the decks because he has a live instrument on the belly. It’s like a piano.

So he makes live edits of songs and connecting with the crowd. So I was speechless when I was the DJ before Joachim. So I was like, this is amazing.

He’s the best live DJ I have ever seen in my life, I would say.

[Darran]
Sounds like he might have had, is it a keytar? Yeah, a keytar. One of our resident artists that we work with, Avian Invasion, plays the keytar during his live streams and sets and stage performances as well.

Pretty awesome. You can actually gift him bits in Twitch to get him to pull out the keytar and do something live during the show. That was amazing.

[Jungstedt]
Just the live elements of a DJ set. It’s always amazing. I work with singers and drummers and saxophonists sometimes during my sets and I always think it adds something when it’s live.

[Darran]
I had a very, you could say, fan crush in a sense on a certain artist. His name is Chuck Love. Have you ever heard of Chuck Love?

It rings a bell. Chuck Love is, when I first saw him, funny enough, he was standing outside, sitting outside, I didn’t know who he was. And this guy was in front of a club and he had a trombone.

And he’s sitting on the sidewalk in front of the nightclub playing the trombone. And I remember seeing that going, why is a street performer sitting out in front of a nightclub playing a trombone? Typical thing you’d see in a city, you’re just like, okay.

And this is a club that I frequently went to called the C Sound Lounge. Never had seen anyone do that before. Later on, the show comes in, the guy gets up on stage and not only does he get up and start playing the DJ set, he busts out the trombone.

And I’m like, wait a second, that was the guy who was just sitting outside practicing. Then he proceeded to get other musical instruments. He probably played six or seven different musical instruments and then sang over top of his tracks.

On top of all this, I was just completely blown away. I mean, the diversity of what he could do and everything was just dialed in. And this nightclub was a very small nightclub, a very intimate nightclub where no matter where you were at, you were probably 15 feet away from the DJ.

And it didn’t hold too many people, maybe 150, they packed people in, maybe 200 people. But it was just so phenomenal. But the most memorable part of that was, I’m sitting in the crowd and the song comes on and it was, I don’t think it’s called Dancing All Night.

Dancing at Night is the name of the song. But the Jimster remix of that song came out of the Chuck Love song and he started playing it on the decks and I lost my shit. I was like, I know this track, I know this song, what the hell?

So I went up with my phone on stage and I asked my assistant or whatever, I said, is this him? Is this him? And she goes, yeah, that’s him.

And I go, this is Chuck Love, the guy who wrote this song and playing right. I mean, I just, wow, you know, crazy. So seeing that kind of incorporation in two DJ and slash live performance, I really see there being a niche for something like that.

And when I say it would be more of a stage performance than, say, just the standard DJ set of getting up there behind the decks headphones, that’s really going to tie in the crowd with that overall live and especially improvisational aspect of doing a live segment as well. Hoping that we see more stuff like that coming out in the future, which would be just awesome.

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, I love it.

[Darran]
Speaking of that, another Darran taking over the mic and talking about my experience and stuff. Who is the biggest influence when it comes to your career as an artist and why?

[Jungstedt]
Oh, big question. But I’ve been inspired by many good DJs both in Sweden and abroad, but we have a lot of good Stockholm DJs like Steve Angelo, Avicii. They were both born in my city.

So Alesso and we have Susten Ingrosso and Axwell is from south of Sweden. But we have Erik Prids, we have a very good DJ culture in Stockholm. But I would say the biggest influence is still the Fugees and The Score, my first album.

I listened to it for several years and then I got to play with Wyclef and Franz Michael at two occasions like 2005 and 2014, I think. And that was just amazing, of course. So I’m still a big fan of the Fugees.

[Darran]
Awesome. Give me two seconds. My cat, Doja, the disco cat, is trying to get into the office right now and knocking the door.

[Jungstedt]
No problem.

[Darran]
He loves to jump in and be part of the show. Hang on a second here.

[Jungstedt]
No problem.

[Darran]
As soon as I let him jump in and be a part of the show. I have a cat as well. So out of all this, your career, you’re going moving forward and doing everything.

How would you define success as a DJ slash producer? Is that a Beatport top 10 hit, a signing to a label, a sold out tour? What are your thoughts on this?

[Jungstedt]
I’m trying to not think of the money in this when I’m releasing music. Everybody’s asking me, how is it going? Are you making any money?

That’s not a big part of this. It’s like I want to do stuff that’s fun and creative and then time will tell what this leads. But a success in this industry is when you have great DJ gigs, I think, when you are having fun, when you get to be picky what you play, like what venues you play, when you maybe can say no to venues that are bad and say yes to venues that are good.

I’m really eager to go out and play. I had a couple of months of not playing, which I needed, but now I’m really eager to go out and maybe play outside Sweden as well.

[Darran]
I was going to say, going out of my city was one of the biggest successes for me. I don’t play, but being able to go to Amsterdam or Berlin, I’m planning to go to Mexico next month for Dreamfields. I was supposed to go to New York for John Summit’s show a few weeks back.

And planning out my whole UK-EU tour is just exciting. I don’t know if that would even be considered success yet. I think my friend asked me once what success was for me and he always laughs because he thinks that I surround myself with money, money, money, money.

No, it’s not about money. It’s about wanting to have offices, being able to pay a staff, being able to cover my marketing costs. Maybe, okay, I want to buy a Learjet and have a Black American Express card and be able to buy whatever I want.

But it’s not about the money. It’s about having the way to operate a successful business that I would want to be a multi-million dollar entity. And yes, if I get a nice paycheck out of it at the end of the day, cool.

But running a company, you have to be able to pay people for what they do. And I got to be able to retain that talent. Otherwise, they’re going to go work somewhere else and somebody is going to offer a paycheck and say, bye.

And in order to be competitive in that, I have to offer them something that’s going to be competitive. So if I wanted five employees, probably to really be full-time staffers with this, I’d probably be looking at minimum 75 to 100 a year just to keep them there and not have them fly off to some other companies around the world or be plucked. I mean, people could come in and cherry pick them and say, hey, we’ll give you $200,000 if you leave the DJ sessions.

How do I compete with that? So keep good people on. But yeah, success isn’t about money.

And I really appreciate that. Somebody said to me once, I think if you go out there for the money, well, then you’re in this business for the wrong thing. Yeah.

I agree with that. Yeah. Speaking of business decisions, what has been the best business decision you’ve made in favor of your artist career?

[Jungstedt]
Well, I would say to start my DJ company back in 20 years ago, because I needed to start it because we were asked by companies to play at their events. So I had to start my business like a real company. So I learned the hard way to pay taxes and everything.

And yeah, that should be the answer to that, I think.

[Darran]
Yeah. I can definitely relate to that was almost the exact same scenario was breaking away. And I’ve had a lot of business decisions to make over the years, obviously.

But breaking away and starting my own company and becoming my own business and entity and taking the reins under my control. I found that I actually probably have been best suited to be an entrepreneur. I’ve worked for great companies like Apple and Nordstrom and have high levels of customer service.

But owning my own companies has definitely put me in where I need to be, where I can be in control, in a sense, not that I’m a freak, but I like to move really fast. And if I have to wait for somebody to approve a decision or I’m number three on the tier or 10 on the tier in decision making process because I don’t have seniority or anything, I’m like, what the hell am I doing here then? You want me to present you with an awesome idea?

And you say, no, we’re not going to implement it. So now what do I do at my job? The status quo.

And then you want to let me go because performance isn’t up, but I gave you a plan on how to increase performance and you’re not going to do it. So now you want me to go back to the plan and rewrite this and no, see you later. I haven’t had a real job really since 2009, pretty much.

But I like to enjoy what I do, but it’s tough being an entrepreneur, especially in the entertainment industry. I think being an entrepreneur in itself is a hard game, but being in entertainment and having to climb and change and adapting to technology over the years, as well as something I think that’s huge. I mean, you’ve seen this from the DJ world of playing records to becoming digital and CDJs.

And now you don’t even have to have a library anymore. If your deck’s connected to the internet, you’re connected into just Beatport. Of course, you’re not supposed to use your Beatport library to play public events, but I mean, even if somebody could upload their own music to their own server and the decks were able to go into their own server and play, they wouldn’t have to, oh, I didn’t bring my flash drive.

Oh no, I can’t play. Deck’s connected to the internet. There you go.

But not having to carry crates and records around anymore. It’s like, oh, it’s all right here. Here I go, here I go.

And you can do a sound check. Make sure your drives work before the show. Oh, sorry.

I know I was going to say, that’s kind of just the evolutionary nature of the game. I mean, I’ve always planned myself at least 10 years ahead of the game. I’ve seen things that I’ve done.

People thought I was crazy for thinking these things. And then I’d go implement them and do them. And then 10 years later, it becomes the next biggest thing.

And they’re like, well, let’s go talk to Darran. He’s the guy who’s been doing that for 10 years. And I go, now you want to talk to me about this?

I was trying to tell you 10 years ago, we have a VR nightclub. And it’s really an exciting project going on because I know video game systems, VR clubs, they’re going to grow. It’s going to become something down the line.

Once the headsets become a little smaller, they get Nintendo eyes or Xbox eyes or PlayStation eyes. Everyone’s going to have one in their home. It’ll be awesome.

But you just saw Daft Punk do something in Fortnite, which was a huge success. I think they had like 12 million people come through. And they built out a really awesome experience.

Of course, I don’t have Daft Punk money or support behind what we do. Hopefully successful one day, yeah. But we want to make sure that people are…

We’re looking at those different mediums, even with QR codes. I was talking about those in 2009, 2010. People thought I was a little…

What is he talking about? I’d rather type in the address. Or what do you mean I have to take my phone and download an app and then I can point and click and it opens up?

Yeah. And then Pandy hits and now you see QR codes everywhere. I told you all this was going to be really awesome.

Yeah. But when it comes to going out and DJing, do you prefer… Do you do large scale festivals or events or do you prefer more intimate nightclub settings?

[Jungstedt]
Honestly, I prefer more intimate settings. I’ve done some big shows, but if I get to choose, I’m more into like smaller nightclub slash… You know, the new disco is perfect for bars and more fancy hotel establishments like that.

But I also enjoy bigger nightclubs. And I played the biggest in Sweden and some out in Europe. But if I get an invitation to like a big festival, I wouldn’t say no.

But, you know, I like to connect with the crowd when I’m playing. So at a smaller venue, you can really connect and make it a special night.

[Darran]
Absolutely. I definitely… I mean, the first clubs that I went to…

I started going to nightclubs raised in like 1992. And one club we had here in Seattle was called The Underground. And back then, you know, you’d have the DJ booth up in a corner, like you kind of see the DJ playing up there, but it wasn’t mainstream.

We were the dancers on stage dancing. We were kind of the main attraction and act on the stage in a sense. I was never a professional go-go or stage dancer, but definitely cut a rug out on the floor a time or two and having fun.

But, you know, as it’s become more prominent for the DJ to be the center of attention, I was just watching an interview recently with somebody. Oh, I saw it on social media. And they were talking about, gosh, who was a very notable DJ.

I can’t remember. It was just a few days ago. And he was talking about how did the DJ become…

It wasn’t the focal point to now the DJ being the focal point on stage. And he actually said, who wants to watch a DJ? What is there to really watch if you’re standing up, there’s a person behind the…

They’re doing this, but you’re on the ground. What are you watching? You should be listening and you should be dancing.

And who wants… Okay, I’m watching the DJ. I’m going to capture this moment.

You should be dancing and having fun.

[Jungstedt]
It was all about dancing. And the DJ was hidden in the corner, like a dark corner. A dark corner.

Then I was a part of the house wave with Avicii and Swedish House Mafia. And with that came the superstar DJ concept. And everybody in Stockholm, Sweden wanted to be a DJ and a superstar.

So suddenly everybody was a DJ and everybody wanted a poster of themselves on the wall and standing like this in front of the crowd. And I was in the middle of that and from anonymous to trying to be a superstar. So it’s interesting, I would say, why it happened.

But Avicii and Swedish House Mafia was a big part of that, I think.

[Darran]
Well, now you have electronic music taking over the festival circuits. That electronic music is getting booked more than rock music is now. And hip-hop at the major festivals.

I keep seeing reports coming out and it slowly is taking up a piece, more of a piece of the pie. And it’s here to stay. I mean, I was just listening to a track the other day by Stardust.

I’m sure you know it. Please don’t criticize my musical vocals here, but you know the song, Ooh, baby, music sounds better with you. If that came out today, it still sounds like it’s a song that could have just come out today.

Yeah. I love it. I was listening to that last night or yesterday or the day before.

It came out like, this is such a classic song. That’s the thing with electronic music is because of the mastering and the production and what’s there now, it can stay timeless. It’s not like a song that you listen from the seventies and the recording studio, the tape, the analog to digital.

It didn’t stay there. The songs that are that old weren’t mastered. So when you listen to some older song out of the seventies or eighties, you put it in a nice hi-fi system.

There’s not that deep base that they started using. And you know this coming out of hip-hop and looking at hip-hop, using 808s and things of that nature, it just doesn’t hit. But that electronic music has had that hit to it since its early days.

Well, not early, early, early days. I’m not talking like in the seventies and eighties, but the basis or the fullness of the richness, I guess you could say. It can be timeless.

Plus it transcends cultures, I think, personally. If it’s not really lyric heavy, it’s the music. And the music sounds the same to me as it does to somebody in Japan, in Brazil, in Australia, or in New York.

I guess I went country, country, country, city, but New York can kind of be its own country in itself. That being said, that’s what’s really awesome about the growth. Interesting to see where it goes, but you’re right with the big show productions, the big stage productions.

A lot of people say, now you’re going for that but as the younger generation, they go to those smaller intimate settings. They’re like, well, there’s no fireworks. There’s no LED screens.

So what am I going to do? And then they pull out their phone. They’re trying to capture a moment or they get bored because of that.

Also in that statement, the gentleman was saying in the video is he used to go out to shows and a song used to be six, seven minutes long. Now you’re getting songs that are three minutes long.

[Jungstedt]
It’s a TikTok generation mixes. I’ve always been against too fast mixing. It’s like you should really play the song for a couple of minutes to really feel it.

[Darran]
I experienced that when I went to Vegas years ago for the first time that with every 35 seconds, 40 seconds, they’re playing another song, another song, another song, and they’re catering to, in Vegas, you have an in and out crowd. The people that live there, they don’t go to the strip. They don’t go to the casinos.

They don’t go to the nightclubs and do all that stuff there. I mean, some might, okay, I’m not speaking for everyone, but they usually avoid it like the plague. But you go to those clubs, they got to cater to so many different people that are coming in from all over.

You kind of get a taste going. So everyone feels there’s something going. And it’s not even an all you can eat buffet of music.

It’s kind of like just throw all this stuff on a plate and eat. You’re like, okay, as opposed to getting a great new disco set or a good trance set. I heard they’re now referring to trance as melodic house.

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, I heard that as well.

[Darran]
Something like that, melodic house. And it’s like, wait, isn’t that trance? Nope, it’s melodic.

Don’t quote me on that one. I should know. I should know this stuff, but I saw that.

But yeah, I mean, it’s kind of like that. And that kind of leads me into this question here is if you could change one thing that bothers you about the electronic music scene, worldwide scene as a whole, what would that be? And how would you go about doing that?

[Jungstedt]
Put the phones away, I would say. When I watch clips from big shows and everybody’s holding their phone and not enjoying the moment, put the phones away. It’s not that hard, but that’s the major issue I have with it.

[Darran]
You know, it’s funny you mentioned that the first time. There was an event here in Seattle that happened like that a while back where they called it No Signal, I believe, and they took your cell phone out the door. I believe that’s what they did.

But as of late, there’s been more and more prominent nightclubs around the world that are banning cell phone use on the dance floor. When I was in Berlin last year, I walked up to this very prominent nightclub and first thing I did, oh, check your ID. Okay, great.

And a roll of stickers there. Sticker, sticker. I was like, yeah, that’s good.

Not that I would ever use my phone like that. But I think that is a big topic nowadays of people coming in and being on the dance floor. I brought this up in probably the last 10 interviews that I’ve spoke with people about this and funny video I saw the other day.

I keep mentioning this. There was a girl and she’s up in front of the DJ booth and she’s like this. There was somebody filming her from behind.

You can see she’s visibly texting, but up at the front of the booth, position one, like this. And the DJ just goes like this. And you start playing.

The girl, the guy, whoever’s filming, the girl turns around like, oh, it’s like, and I’m a big proponent of that coming to growing up. But I was talking to somebody and I said, these kids are 15 years old. They’re going in with their phone automatically.

So it’s, yeah, I happen to have it out of their hand or that disconnect. It’s kind of weird for them or not weird, not natural for them just to be there. So I even have an event space.

I’m putting together some stuff here with, and on the nights that I’m there, we’re looking at doing live streaming from the event. And, uh, I think in my proposal, if I get it, it’d be the event production manager. There is a saying on our nights, if there are nights, there is no cell phone use allowed.

You’ll be asked once, put your phone away. I will create a booth. We’ll create an area.

If you wanted some selfies with a backdrop or whatever, go over there. But if we see you’re using your phone anywhere in the club, we’re going to ask you once. And then twice, we’re going to ask you to leave, you know, and start trying to start a trend here in the area that says, Hey, we’re here about the music.

We’re having the fun. Go ahead and write a bad review about us. We don’t care because anyone’s going to say you’re at a nightclub.

What are you doing using your phone in the club? And because people don’t understand that one, you don’t have a location. You don’t have a release form to be filming or recording on site.

It’d be one thing if we were bringing in a VHS camera and it was poor quality and it was never going to live anywhere, but your living room going back to the nineties. But now you got three 48 megapixel cameras on your phone. You got an ability to upload that and have thousands of not tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of people see right from your fingertips.

You could edit and put everything together and go boom. Okay. That might be great from a marketing standpoint, but that performer did not agree to that.

I didn’t agree to be filmed. The location didn’t agree to be filming in there. And this is now a recording full-fledged broadcast quality.

It has been that way for years, but recording device and audio device. And also we’ll be probably pay-per-viewing our shows. So we don’t want somebody to come in here and get the show for free.

And that’s the quality of the show. And and then I have people tune in and the artists would share in the revenue generated from that as well. So, you know, I don’t think that that’s a big request and hopefully could maybe start a trend here in the Seattle area.

Maybe it’ll go further. And I know Lane Eight actually puts in their rider, but there’s no cell phone recordings in the shows. Because I guess that I can’t remember the name of, I should know this, but they have a series that they do.

It’s like, gosh, I should know this. Let me, now I feel bad that I don’t know this. So I’m going to pull it up.

Lane Eight, no phone use. Oh, yeah. The event, the party is called This Never Happened.

Okay. And that’s the name. And it’s because he wants the audience live music instead of recording it for social media.

That’s amazing. Yeah. If it’s one of his, and I’m wondering if we might see the actually, instead of the venues doing this, that the artists themselves might start requiring this in their rider saying, this is going to happen.

And this is something that’s going to happen. And maybe they get ballsy enough to say, hey, I see a cell phone out there recording me in the audience. I’m stopping my show until that cell phone goes away.

You know, getting audience participation and saying, hey, you’re ruining our music experience, put the damn thing away. Excellent.

[Jungstedt]
Sorry, I was at a Chris Rock performance in here in Stockholm. And you had to put your phone in a box. Yep.

At the entrance. It was amazing. I enjoyed the show and didn’t film anything.

So I think that’s maybe that’s the future.

[Darran]
And there’s a company out there that actually makes a bag that you put your phone in the bag, and the bag magnetically seals. You can only get that if it goes into a certain area, you can unlock the bag. Or if you go outside, it unlocks the bag.

But other than that, at least your phone’s still with you. But I do like the sticker idea because it does give somebody the ability to text or get a call. They won’t say anything about it.

But literally for legal purposes, that’s the justification we’re going to use to say, you don’t have a right to film on our property. You don’t have a right to film the show. You don’t have the licenses to the music that you’re recording, which goes against all the standards of every social media website out there.

You’re not supposed to distribute or record or anything like that, music you don’t have the rights to. So we put that up as a legal precedence. We didn’t create copyright law.

The government did, and we’re abiding by that and protecting the artists and their integrity of their performance. Some people say that could be a bad thing. It’s a marketing tactic.

It’s free marketing. Okay, go ahead. You let people do that.

We’ll stick to ours. We want to be about the music and be encompassing and let people know and tell people socially through word of mouth, oh my gosh, I was there. Oh, wow.

That was such an awesome night. I couldn’t believe it. I was actually at a show and I didn’t have 50 people in front of me going like this.

[Jungstedt]
Exactly.

[Darran]
And if they want to tell their friends about it, they’re at an amazing show, tune into the live stream and pay us some money to watch what we’re doing. And then we can also make those episodes available for those people that purchased it too, available for say 30 days. And then after 30 days is up, we can then release the content open to the public.

It’d be awesome. Something I don’t see a lot of. Coachella, yes.

Tomorrowland, yes. Big, big, big, big stuff that they’re televising and stuff around the world. But at an independent level, that’s not happening.

So we want to bring that back and share the music and do it in a really professional way. You know, is there anything at all, I should say is when you’re not entertaining others, what do you do to entertain yourself? I know you work out, you’re a kid, you know.

[Jungstedt]
And as I said, it’s soccer or football as we say in Europe. That’s my main interest. But I also like reading books, actually.

And I like spending time with my family and friends. I like what more do I like? I like to walk.

I’m a walker. So I like to when I have the time, I like to walk a couple of miles and listen to music at the same time.

[Darran]
Yeah.

[Jungstedt]
I had an English bulldog and that was my best friend for many years. But he’s not with me anymore. But that was one of my passions, just spending time with him.

So I would say, yeah, spending time with my kid, of course.

[Darran]
Yeah, I’m a soccer coach as well. Oh, nice, nice. Yeah, I get a chance to get up and out of this chair sometimes and take my friend’s dog that I watch quite frequently for a walk and use that as kind of go play ball, go play fetch and get some movement action.

Awesome. Well, is there anything else you want to let our DJ Sessions fans know before we let you get going?

[Jungstedt]
Yeah, I would like them to go to Spotify and check out our cover of How Will I Know with Whitney Houston. OK, it’s produced by me, Disco Tron from England and Sticky Decks, a.k.a. Martin Larsson from Uppsala, Sweden. So check it out.

Definitely. Where’s the best place people can go to find that out? Spotify and Beatport, of course.

Apple Music, Deezer, Tracksource. Yeah, search Jungstedt and you will find the songs. Yeah.

What about your website? Jungstedtmusic.com. That’s there.

It’s down there. Yeah. That’s the site.

[Darran]
Yeah. Well, Jungstedt, thank you very much for coming on the show today. We definitely want to follow up with you, stay in touch with you as we always like to do here at the DJ Sessions.

We’d also love to get other producers you work with on the show as well. We can have up to 10 people in this room, so maybe we do a group session at some time in the near future. That’d be really awesome.

And looking forward and congratulations on releasing a new track as well.

[Jungstedt]
Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Darran]
It’s been great. Yeah. On that note, don’t forget to go to our website, thedjsessions.com.

Find us all. Everything we got going on is right there at thedjsessions.com. Follow our socials.

We have over 700 news stories a month, live interviews just like this one here, 2,700 past episodes, our new music section coming out, VR nightclub, mobile app 2.0 coming out here soon, and more at thedjsessions.com. Also look for the new revamp on our merch store as well, coming soon. I’m Darran coming to you from the virtual studios in Seattle, Washington, and that’s Jungstedt coming in from Stockholm, Sweden for the DJ Sessions.

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