This video of a kid acting like a DJ in his basement might make us cringe a little, but he’s a kid. He’s not harming anybody, right? Anyone with any sense will laugh and shrug this off. But I have no sense. This has been shared around way too much to be random. So I decided to dive deeper.
DJ KiddLuke has 20 followers on SoundCloud, with less than 5000 plays on it. He has less than 1000 likes on Facebook, but somehow feels that he can call himself the “#1 Teen DJ Worldwide." Maybe he hasn’t seen video of A-Trak in his teenage years competing in the DMCs?
He also calls himself “Founder ATL’s Largest Teen Club," which seems to be a night where he has his parents buy out a roller rink for his friends to come party at while he plays songs. He boasts being booked at “birthday parties and private events." He has testimonials on his website, but no production, information on the "club" he "owns," past events, or credibility. His video has been hosted everywhere from Reddit to Worldstar and the comments on his Facebook fan page are nothing short of hateful. He’s just a kid trying to hustle from his basement, right? And this wouldn’t be a story if he didn’t somehow land on one of the biggest festivals in Atlanta last weekend.
It gets better. He has 40,000 Twitter followers. Someone who has less than 5000 results on Google when you put his name in quotes has 10 times amount the Twitter followers as I do. I have nearly 100 times as many results when searched. As we talk about paying for position (Twitter followers / bookings), this kid has management and a PR firm. And we’re trying to figure out why. He hasn’t DONE anything.
What I’m not going to do is slam this kid for his DJ skills. I personally don’t understand what he’s doing, but he’s playing for kids. Maybe it works. I am not going to slam his personality. He’s kind of quirky and I actually like his enthusiasm. What I am doing to do is question how this kid landed on a GIANT music festival. How does this happen? In the legit grind of the music industry, we can tell you who the top producers under 21 are. And this isn’t a name that’s ever been on our list. But when you've got 25,000 more followers than DJ Sliink (who has toured numerous times around the world, released an EP on Fool's Gold, has an arsenal of amazing original songs, and a track with Flosstradamus sitting well over half a million plays), it's easy to put together a press kit to look legit.
But whoever booked this kid should be removed from the music industry. Something outside of skill landed him on that lineup at Magnetic in Atlanta. The outright hate for this teenager is misguided, but he is being pushed and supported by adults, and landing on festivals that he has no right being on. There is something undeniably wrong about this.
