Deadmau5 talks EDM: ‘Event Driven Marketing’

“It’s a healthy industry. Minimum work for maximum profit, really.” Speaking with Billboard’s editorial director Bill Werde at the recent FutureSound conference, Joel Zimmerman had some typically dry assessments of the business he’s in as Deadmau5. “EDM is like Event Driven Marketing…It’s interesting to see that not too many people are forward-thinking about electronic music. They’re just, ‘do it, do it, do it’.” Over the course of the conversation – which you can watch in full below – Zimmerman touched on the inaccuracies of the Forbes ‘Electronic Cash Kings’ list, the mau5 head spawning imitators (“I’m not going to condemn them for doing it, like the first guy to put a thing on my head”) and the never-ending beefs of DJ Sneak.

“Forbes came out and decided to be cool for a minute, and said here are the top 20 multi-million-dollar-making things,” Zimmerman said of the list of top-earners. “People can read so fast through that and not really realise, OK, first of all, is that gross ticket sales? We all knows that bands, musicians and artists don’t get gross. I called my manager and was like, ‘Yo, what the fuck? I’m nine million short, dude!’ Just ‘cause some guy said 11 million does not put 11 million in my bank account. Why is Forbes writing about electronic music, first of all? Because it’s a money issue now.”

Recently, UK bass-bender Rusko revealed he now plans to release all his music for free. Zimmerman, it seems, is also unperturbed: it’s the live experience that can’t be pirated. “I don’t feel bad about a kid sending over a Zip file of my whole fucking catalogue,” he told Bill Werde. “I don’t care. Awareness is key in Event Driven Marketing, especially when it comes time to sell the ticket. What, are you going to pirate me to the stage? Good luck with that. In relation to my career, I’m all about the show.”

As for the the cliques within dance music: “Burn all electronic music down, I don’t care,” he said. “At the end of the day, scenes don’t evolve. Scenes are scenes. With DJ Sneak we’re talking about this guy who comes in today, 20 years later, and says, fuck all this shit, it isn’t real house music! Yes, we know, it was a 909 and an old sample, great…Do you go down the river to beat your clothes on a rock and hate on me for using a washing machine? Scenes aren’t too important to me.”

On the music-making side of things, Zimmerman earlier today revealed his new remix for How To Destroy Angels, the project of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and his wife Mariqueen Maandig, along with Atticus Ross and Rob Sheridan. Have a listen below.