DJing

Way back when I started my first nightclub in SL, I used to select streaming music radio stations to play music at our club events. We'd have pole dancing girls and some escorts too. So people would come in and dance and chat. The guys would tip the dancers and sometimes an escort might find a customer and go off to do what she does. The winner of the contest selected and a payout from the contest board would occur. The whole event would be over with in about one hour.

We never really did get a lot of people in to party with us though. Jojo would often go out and pick up guys to come and party but for the most part, there were not a lot of people attracted to our club, The Golden Nugget. Every so often, I would run across a DJ. Sometimes I would pay them, most times they worked for tips. Those events would tend to bring in a lot more guests than the ones without a live DJ. So I decided to learn to DJ primarily to save myself money. As it turns out, DJing is very expensive. The software of choice for me was SAMs Broadcaster. Hundreds of dollars later I'm finding that I have to pay a monthly service fee to ServerRoom to stream my SAMs output to. ServerRoom in turn streams it back into SL. So after getting this all setup, I find that I can finally stream my music with voice over into SL. But there's a problem. It seems the stream was coming in too fast and with too much data for SL. So I had to turn down the quality of the stream just to get it to keep from cutting out. An important lesson here: The laggier a location, the less quality of stream you will want to try to force SL to accept. If your music stream tends to cut out, then chances are you are pushing too high of a bit rate. I have found over the years that 48kBit per second with 24,000 Hz stereo works the best under a wide range of lag conditions.

After a while, I got out of the nightclub business. Too much drama from the girls and too much stress from the lack of attendees and too expensive. But I maintained my subscription to ServerRoom because it was very very handy to be able to stream music in SL during parties and stuff. Also, the occasional scheduled DJ would fail to show up at friend's clubs and getting paid good money to take their place at the last moment's notice was nice too. Still, no matter what I made DJing in SL came nowhere near compensating for the expense of maintaining a readily available streaming music source. This final effort of mine to make Cherry Street a busy place pretty much failed. I've discovered that it's the number of group members your club has that makes all the difference and the only way to get a lot of group members is through hard work and a lot of time and expense. But it does eventually start to pay off. Just ask my buddy Alobar. He and sami have built a successful night club and BDSM hangout over the years. As I mentioned in a recent post, their club was even chosen as a top destination by Linden Labs for a week or more. And what a busy week that was. But the main thing was that during that week or so, hundreds of people were asked to join their group via an automatic joiner, and it worked. They now have almost 2000 members and that's when efforts start to pay off. In contrast, my group only had 300 members. If I sent out a notice, I was lucky to get 1% of that number to attend. 1% of 2000 is a very good sized party!

So now, once per week, I DJ at Alo and sami's club. Sometimes I break even in tips, but most of the times the tips are good and I do well. The house does not take a cut so I usually tip back about 10%. I will never get rich DJing at the rate I am now, but offsetting my modest expenses here in SL is really all I'm after. But it is conceivable that one could make a very decent living in SL as a DJ. DJing in SL has changed a bit from the first times I did it at my first club. First of all, the events are at least 2 hours if not longer. I was considering applying at a very busy and popular place in SL, but they wanted a 3 hour commitment. Hell, I can barely commit to 2 hours as it is, so I'll have to think about that one for a while. Secondly, most places will want you to stick with a certain style of music, which is okay, but just because a song is popular, does not mean it will fit in with the local nightclub's theme. At Rising Sun, I blend their genre of blues with some rock, pop and oldies too. It works out pretty good.

So I might look into taking on a 2nd night of the week DJing at either Rising Sun or some other place to help offset my expenses, but keeping in mind that a group with members of 2000 or more will make it worth the effort.