Your Questions: Will Having Kids Wreck My DJ Career?

Christian Yates
Read time: 2 mins
Last updated 25 March, 2018

In today's question, our reader wants to know how starting a family will affect his DJ career.
In today’s question, our reader wants to know how starting a family will affect his DJ career.

Digital DJ Tips reader Joey writes: “I’m thinking about getting married soon and I want to have children before I turn wrinkly and toothless. At the moment, I have a standard job in the week and DJ at the weekends. In your experience, how might having a spouse, and little kids running around, affect my bustling DJ career?”

Digital DJ Tips says…

This is a tough question to answer. It’s going to boil down to how willing you are to compromise. Which type of DJ you are (or want to be) will also be a factor.

If you have a supportive partner then your DJ career could remain largely unaffected. However, something will have to give if you add children to an already busy schedule. Managing a nine-to-five job throughout the week and DJing at the weekend is tough enough as it is. After (and during) a hectic week, are you going to have the energy left over to give your children the attention they need as well as maintain a DJ career?

With compromise and commitment, lots of DJs (several in this company, me included) do find ways of juggling DJing with work and family life. In my case, after weighing things up it was agreed that we would stop taking on weekend gigs. This means I can guarantee my wife and children two full days at home per week.

If your DJ business requires you to work weekends without exception, then you might have to consider a career change. Would you be prepared to stay at home, look after the house and care for the children during the week while your partner works? Would your partner be OK with you being out working (“partying”) all weekend? When are you going to spend time with each other? A plan for these likelihoods should be discussed from the offset.

There is also the space and money factor. Many of the DJ gear listings you will find on sites like eBay and Craigslist are made by soon-to-be parents. In my case, space was an issue, so we moved my DJ gear out to a rented space. Children are expensive and so I have also had to sell off some of my loved but lesser-used gear to put money back into the family pot. (Of course, digital gear puts you at an advantage here, as there’s no “room full of records” to find a new home for…)

One truth is that having children changes everything, and some DJs do decide to hang up their headphones for good. How much your DJ career will actually be affected will only really become apparent with the arrival of children into your already busy life.

How did starting a family affect your DJ career? Have you got any tips to share for DJs expecting children? Let us know in the comments below…

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