Facing The Hate
When a DJ gets a bit carried away in self-promoting, people are often turned off and a certain amount of bad rep arises from it. Or at least that what most DJs themselves think about it. Afraid that fans might label them pretentious, they try to tune down all their promotional activities to a minimum. The thing is, what fans are they afraid of losing if they haven’t made any actual effort to attract these fans in the first place? It may be that at the base of this reluctance to market yourself sits a deep rooted fear of being hated.
Nobody likes it, fair enough. But let’s try to look at the logic here (or lack of thereof). You work hard as a DJ, you release music and organize events, people like what you do. But when you’re trying to spread out your music to more people, you’re suddenly being pretentious. It makes no sense! And it shouldn’t, because things like increasing your online presence, getting quality photos of yourself and being friendly around the press constitutes basic marketing and is the only way of getting anywhere with anything. It can only provoke hate in a special breed of people, illogical, immature and perpetually self-centred haters.
The sun will rise in the west before you make a single hater like you. Or not hate you. Or hate you less. They may honestly believe to be on a crusade against pretentiousness, but also don’t know the first thing about you. Reason they’re actually basing their hate on may be unknown even to them and their “criticism” functions only as an outlet for some deep-seated anger and jealousy issues.
If anything, the number of haters you have should be an indication of your rise to popularity, a sign that your marketing efforts are starting to pay off. Haters circle success like flies. Of course, there’s also the case of some popular people actually being stuck-up and pretentious, but that’s far from being a rule. It’s just that rude and hateful people are often leaving a stronger impression on us than nice ones.
Speaking of which, this is why you should focus more on your fans than your haters. You may try all you want to be nice and not pretentious at all, but haters will come by either way. On the other hand, you could promote yourself rigorously and focus on delivering high quality music to fans that like you, in which case the hate will be eclipsed by the love you'll get from them.