With reported yearly earnings of $20 million, Tiesto’s certainly no one’s idea of an underground hero. However, as the Dutch kingpin told Mixmag in a Q&A this week, he has no “desire” to penetrate the American pop mainstream and possibly add a few extra digits to his salary. In other words, he doesn’t see himself as on the same trajectory as David Guetta.

“I feel like I’m more of an underground DJ compared to the pop/mainstream world,” he mused in the interview. “My music for some people is commercial type music, but in general it’s not radio-friendly. I like where I am. I don’t need to be in that more poppy arena, it doesn’t fulfill me to be honest.

“I’d like to make a great track and have people love it, but if it’s number 1 or in the top 100 or lower, it doesn’t matter to me as long as when I play it out, the reaction of the crowd loves it as if it was number one for them.”

Tiesto is as underground as you can get while still playing to colossal crowds, suggests the interviewer. “Yeah, exactly,” agrees the DJ. “But what do you call that? Am I commercial underground?” Commercial underground trouse: catchy!

Big bucks would certainly have rolled in from the final stop of Tiesto’s College Invasion Tour at the 26,000-capacity Home Depot Stadium in L.A. on 8 October. It was the largest single-headliner DJ show in U.S. history, and the video below captures the finale (20,000 views already).

Fans shouldn’t count on a return visit from Tiesto any time soon. In 2012, he plans to “not do many gigs, just a couple of club gigs here and there to stay in shape, but in general I’m going to focus purely on production.”