Who Got Paid
The founding records were licensed for a few hundred dollars and pressed on recycled vinyl. Trax's catalogue is legendary and its royalty history is a scandal that outlived several of the people owed. Meanwhile the job of DJ went from paid-in-drinks to a headline fee larger than most bands earn in a year, and the streaming era rebuilt the whole payment structure again around a fraction of a cent. This facet follows the money, which is the part of the story the music press covers least and the originators talk about most.
Part of House Music
55 moments in this segment.
- - Ralphi Rosario - WBMX Hot Mix 5, 1984. The earliest WBMX tape in this batch, from before house existed as a recorded genre in any quantity. What the Hot Mix 5 were mixing in 1984 was disco, Italo and electro, and hearing it makes plain that house was a way of playing records before it was a way of making them.
- - Julian Jumpin Perez - WBMX Hot Mix 5, 1985. An hour of Julian Jumpin Perez on WBMX from 1985, the year before the first wave of Chicago house records reached the charts, with a tracklist still weighted toward Italo disco, freestyle and imports. It captures the format at the point where the DJs were making house out of records that were not house yet.
- - Ralphi Rosario - WBMX Hot Mix, 25 April 1986. Forty-four minutes of Ralphi Rosario on WBMX, with Steve Silk Hurley's Jack Your Body in the tracklist alongside boogie and Italo imports. Rosario was one of the youngest of the Hot Mix 5 and a gay Latino DJ on Chicago's biggest dance station, which is the demographic history of this music in one air slot.
- - Mickey Mixin Oliver - WBMX Hot Mix, 30 May 1986. A full off-air recording of Mickey Mixin Oliver's Hot Mix on WBMX, mixing Italo, electro and early Chicago tracks on turntables in real time for a citywide audience. Airchecks like this are the only surviving record of what Chicago radio actually sounded like in the year house broke.
- - Kenny Jammin Jason - WBMX Hot Mix, 1986. Kenny Jammin Jason live on WBMX in 1986, the member of the Hot Mix 5 least represented in circulating tape. Another distinct voice from the same booth in the year Chicago radio was carrying house to a mass audience before the records were widely distributed.
- - Frankie Knuckles - WBMX Hot Mix, Chicago 1986. Two and a half hours of Frankie Knuckles on WBMX, the Warehouse resident who had come from New York and effectively defined the Chicago sound, working a commercial radio slot. Long-form tape of Knuckles from the period is rare, and the archive holds almost no moving-image record of him at all.
- - Steve Silk Hurley - Jack Your Body (UK single, No.1). The London Records pressing, catalogue LON117, that took Chicago house to number one on the UK singles chart in January 1987. It is the moment an underground Black gay Chicago sound topped a foreign national chart, and the point at which the British music industry started paying attention.
- - Krush - House Arrest on Top of the Pops. Sheffield's Krush perform House Arrest on BBC prime time as it climbs to number three, one of the first British house records to reach the singles chart. This is the moment the Chicago sound stops being an import for specialist DJs and becomes chart business in Britain.
- - Coldcut and Yazz - Doctorin' the House on Top of the Pops. Coldcut with Yazz and the Plastic Population performing the sample-built record that took British house to number six in March 1988. It shows the commercial end of the story arriving months before the tabloids noticed the clubs at all.
- - Royal House - Can You Party on Top of the Pops. A sample-built New York house record performed on British prime-time television during its UK chart run. The clip is a small piece of evidence for how fast house crossed from Black and Latino club floors in New York into the mainstream British charts. Period broadcast footage rather than a record upload.
- - Bad Boy Bill - WBMX Chicago, late 1980s. An hour of Bad Boy Bill mixing on WBMX, the youngest of the station's house DJs and the one who carried the Chicago radio-mix style into the following decade. Raw off-air tape with no narration, of the kind that documents the station's last years.
- - Farley Jackmaster Funk - WBMX, 16 July 1988. Two and a quarter hours of Farley Jackmaster Funk from midnight on WBMX, recorded in the final weeks before the station abandoned the format that had carried house across Chicago. Farley was both a Hot Mix DJ and the maker of Love Can't Turn Around, so this is a producer playing his own scene on his own station.
- - Terry Farley and Pete Heller - Junior Boy's Own Essential Mix, 27 November 1993. One of the earliest Essential Mixes, broadcast weeks after the strand launched on 30 October 1993, with the Junior Boy's Own pair playing the British house their label was defining. The BBC keeps almost nothing from this period, so listener tapes like this are the archive.
- - Water fight at the Love Parade. Ravers turning the Love Parade into a water fight on Tauentzienstrasse, Berlin, on 8 July 1995. The parade put German dance culture in the middle of the city in daylight, which is a very different proposition from a dark room at four in the morning.
- - Terry Farley and Pete Heller - Junior Boy's Own Essential Mix, 9 July 1995. Two hours of Junior Boy's Own on Radio 1's Essential Mix: the label that grew out of the Boy's Own fanzine, run by the same Balearic crowd that came back from Ibiza, given a national platform. This is house music becoming part of the British broadcasting furniture rather than a police problem.
- - Hot Mix 5 fifteen-year reunion. Scott Silz, Kenny Jason, Ralphi Rosario, Farley Keith Williams and Mickey Oliver back on air together for the team's fifteenth anniversary. A full hour of the original line-up mixing after WBMX itself was gone, and one of the few pieces of evidence of the crew working as a crew.
- - DJ Hell interviewed at the Love Parade. Daisy Dee interviews DJ Hell for the television programme VIVA Club Rotation at the Love Parade in Berlin on 21 July 2001. By then the parade was a mass televised event, worked by camera crews the way a sport is.
- - Rave dancers, two seconds of exposure. Dancers photographed handheld at two to four seconds under available light at a rave in 2002. The blur is the exposure rather than a mistake; the photographer was after the motion of the floor instead of the faces on it.
- - Bodies and light on the floor. A second frame from the same 2002 series of long-exposure rave photographs. Dancers register as trails of skin and light, which is roughly what a crowded floor looks like from inside it.
- - Love Parade, Berlin, 2002. A raver at the Love Parade in Berlin on 13 July 2002, filed on Commons under raver hairstyles. The parade is where German rave culture was at its most public and least deniable.
- - Chab at Continental, Mexico City. The Swiss producer and DJ Chab playing the Continental club in Mexico City in 2007. By this point a working house DJ's year was a circuit of foreign clubs booked weeks apart, which is how the music spread and how the money was made.
- - Masters At Work at a Winter Music Conference yacht party, Miami. Handheld footage of Louie Vega and Kenny Dope opening a sponsored yacht party during the Winter Music Conference in Miami Beach. It shows the trade-show economy house had grown into by the mid-2000s: brand money, free drinks and pioneer DJs as the draw.
- - The rig, built by IT Productions. A sound system built by the Los Angeles company IT Productions at an event in August 2007. The rig is the one cost a party cannot improvise around; almost everything else about a warehouse night can be.
- - Martha Wash in Stockholm. Martha Wash performing at Grona Lund in Stockholm in 2008. Her uncredited lead vocals on early-1990s dance hits led to litigation and to vocal credits becoming a contractual norm, the credit argument that runs through this whole music, fought and won in court.
- - Rachael Cain on Trax Records: from vinyl to virtual. A recorded panel talk, 'I Love Chicago House: From Vinyl To Virtual & Beyond', with Trax Records president Rachael Cain. She addresses what the collapse of physical sales did to an independent label built entirely on 1980s Chicago 12-inches. This is the business side of the music rather than the dancefloor.
- - Daft Punk at the Tron premiere. Daft Punk at the Los Angeles premiere of Tron: Legacy in December 2010, having scored the film. Scoring a Disney blockbuster is one measure of how far the studio-bound French house project had travelled.
- - Vince Lawrence on founding Trax Records. Vince Lawrence describes how Trax Records was set up, including the deals with pressing plants that let a Chicago label put records in shops with almost no capital. Trax released the defining early house records and became just as well known for what it never paid the artists who made them. The founding told by one of the people who did it.
- - Vince Lawrence, house music pioneer. The opening segment of a gearwire interview with Vince Lawrence, who was pressing records as a teenager and co-wrote 'On and On' with Jesse Saunders before helping start Trax. He was also on stage at Comiskey Park for Disco Demolition in 1979, which makes him a direct link between disco's public burning and what Chicago built on the ashes.
- - Vince Lawrence on the rise of On and On. Lawrence tells how he asked for studio time instead of a car for his eighteenth birthday, and what happened once 'On and On' started selling in Chicago stores. Within a year he had helped start a label, which is roughly the speed at which the whole Chicago industry assembled itself.
- - Vince Lawrence on getting into distribution. Lawrence explains how Trax stopped sharing Chicago territory with rival stores and went out to Detroit and beyond to place its own records. Distribution is the unglamorous part of the story and the part that decided which Chicago records the rest of the world ever heard.
- - Derrick Carter - Essential Mix, BBC Radio 1. Two hours of Derrick Carter for Radio 1's Essential Mix, the show that has been the British establishment's dance-music shop window since October 1993. A Chicago DJ given national airtime on the BBC is the point here, the record of house on radio is otherwise almost entirely a story of intermediaries.
- - Benoit & Sergio at Piknic Electronik. The duo Benoit & Sergio performing at Piknic Electronik in Montreal in June 2012. The daytime outdoor series is one of the formats house found once it outgrew the nightclub and became a booking on a festival sheet.
- - Calvin Harris on the Amnesia terrace. Calvin Harris playing the terrace at Amnesia for Cream in August 2012, at the height of the EDM crossover. A pop producer headlining a Balearic institution is the period in one frame.
- - Frankie Knuckles at Amsterdam Dance Event. Frankie Knuckles playing the Sugar Factory during Amsterdam Dance Event in October 2012. ADE is where the business of dance music meets each year, and the man who named the genre was on a club bill like anyone else.
- - Daft Punk in 2013. A promotional photograph of Daft Punk from the Random Access Memories campaign in 2013. The album hired the session players and disco producers of the 1970s, arguing the lineage out loud.
- - Paul Oakenfold on 25 years of Perfecto Records. Oakenfold on founding Perfecto in 1989 while working A&R at Champion Records, built to sign the Balearic and house acts coming out of the Ibiza-to-London pipeline. This is the business end of the story: how a DJ turned a scene into a label and then into a brand.
- - Trax TV: Screamin' Rachael on Move Your Body's legacy. A Chicago public-access television special hosted by Screamin' Rachael, built around Marshall Jefferson's 'Move Your Body' and the evolution of house, with an interview segment and a Trax album launch. Local cable is one of the very few places the label's own account of itself was ever televised.
- - Hot Mix 5: the story of Chicago house on the radio. A short documentary on the Hot Mix 5, the DJ team assembled on WBMX in 1981 whose weekend mixshows put house on commercial FM across Chicago. Most of the city heard this music on a radio rather than in a club, which makes the mixshow, not the dancefloor, the mass distribution channel of the early years.
- - The Black Madonna - Mixmag Live at Patterns, Brighton. Nearly three hours of house and disco at Mixmag's monthly party in Brighton, recorded in the year the magazine named her DJ of the Year. The length is unusual for a media-brand recording and shows her actually building a room rather than delivering a showcase hour.
- - Todd Terry meets Trevor Jackson for Defected House Masters. An hour-long conversation between Todd Terry and Trevor Jackson, made around Terry's entry in Defected's House Masters series. It doubles as a look at how a label curates, packages and resells a catalogue built in the late 1980s.
- - The History of Anjunadeep, with James Grant. Label boss James Grant on how Anjunadeep grew out of a side project into one of the defining British deep-house imprints of the 2010s. A useful modern counterpart to the Chicago and New York label stories: same job, different decade.
- - Jamie Jones in The Lab, Paris. Jamie Jones plays Mixmag's Lab in Paris as part of BUDX, a Budweiser-funded series of club events. The row belongs to the business side of the archive as much as the musical one: by the late 2010s a magazine's DJ booth was a brand-sponsored content studio, and that is how most sets reached listeners.
- - The Black Madonna - Creamfields, Daresbury. Ninety minutes streamed by Beatport from the All Gone Pete Tong stage at Creamfields, the British festival end of the business rather than the club end. The set shows what happens when a DJ formed in Chicago's underground is dropped onto a 70,000-capacity dance festival, and how much of the record collection survives the trip.
- - Nightmares On Wax - Glitterbox Virtual Festival, Ibiza. An hour of disco and house from Ibiza for Glitterbox's Virtual Festival, staged by Defected during the 2020 lockdown with donations directed to the WHO Covid response fund. It is a record of the months when the club business had no clubs and moved wholesale onto livestreams.
- - Mark Finkelstein on founding Strictly Rhythm. The co-founder of Strictly Rhythm on starting the label in 1989 and on Rock and Soul, the midtown record shop that supplied New York's DJs. Short, but it is first-hand testimony on the business side of the label that carried 1990s house worldwide.
- - Screamin Rachael on running Trax Records. Screamin Rachael, who has run Trax Records for decades, talks about the label's current operation and its artists. She is a contested figure, Trax's unpaid-royalty history is the subject of live litigation brought by Robert Owens and Larry Heard in 2020, and hearing the label's own account alongside the artists' is part of understanding the business of house.
- - V4 Visions on their Strictly Rhythm years. A UK production duo telling their own account of getting records out through Strictly Rhythm in New York. First-person material on how an outside act actually reached the label, which the usual label histories skip.
- - What happened to tech house?. Resident Advisor traces how a hybrid of techno's austerity and house's swing turned into the most commercially dominant and most derided sound on Beatport. It is a clear-eyed piece about what happens to a genre when the charts and the festival circuit decide what it is worth.
- - Marshall Jefferson in The Basement, Defected Records. A studio session from Marshall Jefferson in Defected's Basement room, tied to a takeover of the label's Best House & Club Tracks playlist. The pairing of a 1986 Trax originator with a streaming playlist promotion is the whole distance the business has travelled in one frame.
- - Marshall Jefferson - House Masters session for Defected. Defected films Marshall Jefferson playing an hour of classic Chicago material to launch his entry in the label's House Masters compilation series. It shows the modern economics of the music plainly: the catalogue is the asset, and a founder's session doubles as the marketing for a reissue package.
- - Green Velvet - Defected Malta, The Ditch, Valletta. Green Velvet plays the third day of Defected's Malta festival, the first dance event ever staged in The Ditch below Valletta's fortifications. Defected is the label that turned vocal house into a durable business, and its festival arm is what superstar-DJ economics look like applied to a genre born in unlicensed rooms.
- - House Music Royalty: The Story of King Street Sounds. A full documentary on King Street Sounds, the New York label that carried soulful and vocal house through the 1990s and 2000s, made for the label's relaunch. It is a label history told from the business side: A&R, catalogue and the economics of keeping an independent house label alive.
- - Screamin' Rachael on Trax Records - Rhythm Republic Radio. A two-hour radio interview with Rachael Cain, the singer who became Trax Records' owner and the label's public voice. She works through the Chicago catalogue the label was built on and its long afterlife as a reissue business. The host opens with his own story of hearing house for the first time in a Tenerife club.
- - Nick Curly - live from Defected HQ. A studio set by Nick Curly filmed at Defected's own headquarters and released alongside a label single. Defected has been the main commercial gatekeeper for house since the late 1990s, and its in-house broadcasts are how the label now sells records that once moved through specialist shops.
- - Derrick Carter - 6 Mix, BBC Radio 6 Music. Derrick Carter's guest hour for Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC Radio 6 Music's 6 Mix. National radio remains one of the few places a Chicago DJ reaches an audience that did not come looking for house, and Carter uses the hour the way he uses a club: hard, funny and heavily edited on the fly.
