On this episode of Sidequest, Podcast hosts Hela Khalil, Tilly Jones and Anya Modi talk about their experience attending Music Industry 117: The Disc Jockey as Performer and interview Professor Justin Paul and music industry apprentice Alexandra Keshishian about the class.

Anya Modi: Welcome to Sidequest, a miniseries by Daily Bruin Podcasts, where we send Podcast contributors on adventures that are unique to Los Angeles. In each episode, the contributors come to the studio to tell us about their experiences, funny stories and reviews. This is Sidequest.

Hela Khalil: On the show, we usually venture out to cool experiences and places in LA, from Griffith Observatory to watching a live taping of Jeopardy! But this time, we wanted to take advantage of a very unique class opportunity offered right here at UCLA. We couldn’t afford Coachella tickets this year, so we figured, what better way to dive into the world of music than to learn to DJ? On this episode, we attended a UCLA music industry class titled The DJ as Performer.

Tilly Jones: So a little bit about us – we are all in social sciences and STEM fields, so we don’t really get the opportunity very often to take advantage of really creative and unique classes here at UCLA, so this was a really exciting way for us to kind of branch out and try something new.

AM: So before we decided to attend this class, I found out about it through one of my friends who really wanted to take it as her fun senior year spring class. And when I heard about it, I thought it was super cool. So I texted Tilly and Hela, if we wanted to go and sit into the class. And obviously, DJ class sounds awesome, so we decided to email the professor and see if we could get a shot at sitting in.

HK: So Tilly was very brave and volunteered herself to reach out to Professor Paul, who teaches DJ as Performer – the class – and Tilly, do you want to tell us about your experience emailing?

TJ: Of course, so I kind of just cold emailed him out of the blue. Sometimes professors here are very strict about who can attend their classes. Sometimes they’re very open. So I really did not know what the reaction was going to be. And I have almost no experience with the music department or the music industry department, so I had kind of no idea what to expect. But he ended up being really welcoming. He said we could come to any of the lectures in the next few weeks. And it was a really easy process of kind of getting us into the class, getting us to be able to watch it, and it went really well.

So the professor himself, as we said, is named Justin Paul. He’s an international DJ, record producer and obviously university educator, and he’s performed at places from Burning Man to Pukkelpop Festival in Belgium. So we were already very excited to just see what he had to say and kind of get the chance to see him DJing himself. But we actually got the chance to speak with him after attending the lecture to hear about his process creating the class, the music industry and what he hopes the class will teach students going forward. So you’ll get the chance to listen to that at the end of this episode. But it was really great, and he was really welcoming with his time.

HK: So the class started 3 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. I rushed from work, Anya rushed from lab, Tilly, you know, didn’t rush –

TJ: Didn’t rush.

HK: – but was still there, and the three of us met outside of the Schoenberg Music Hall, which is kind of in between North and South Campus at UCLA. I have taken one music industry class before as a GE, but besides that class don’t really spend much time in the building, and it was in an auditorium that I’ve actually never been in. But eventually the three of us walked into the lecture hall, and we, before, you know, the lecture got started, we wanted to introduce ourselves in person to Professor Paul, so we went up to him. He was super kind again and welcomed us to take a seat, and we, you know, got ready for what would be, hopefully, the first step in our journeys to becoming DJs.

TJ: So going into class, we really had absolutely no idea what to expect. We didn’t know if there was going to be a speaker. In our emails, he mentioned that there was going to be a DJ presentation, which I did not know what to expect in that case, but the first segment of the class was actually an interview with a guest speaker, and in this day, the guest speaker was Lauren Anderson, who was a label manager for Render Music International, and they were just on stage having a conversation about the music industry, what she’s learned from her time there. She seemed fairly young, so I think she was pretty new to it, but she had a lot to talk about. What did you guys think about what she had to say?

HK: Yeah, well, one takeaway that I kind of had from the kind of fireside chat between Lauren and Professor Paul was that there’s a very large portion of the music industry that is business, and I guess I never really realized that it’s not just the art of music itself. It’s kind of the art of putting your music out there, promoting it, making sure it’s on the right platforms, getting an audience, organizing events, concerts, shows, whatnot. So I guess that’s why they offer a major at UCLA called music industry that is separate from just the music major, because, you know, especially in the city of Los Angeles, there is a whole industry and kind of professional field surrounding music.

AM: She also talked a lot about how she kind of bridges her interests that are different from just music industry and music as a whole. So she was a psych major before, and she kind of bridges that psych research before and brings that to festivals and has more of an interdisciplinary approach to how she approaches the music. And I thought that was super cool, especially because I think a lot of the class wasn’t music industry majors, and so it’s kind of like you can apply your other interests to this and to your DJing.

TJ: Yeah, something that I found particularly interesting was how she kind of got her start in the music world, because a lot of what they were talking about was EDM music and dance music at raves and clubs, which isn’t something you typically talk about in a university classroom. So that alone was really interesting. But like Anya mentioned, she got into the music industry by working for health and safety at raves and volunteering her time to those communities. And while she was there, she found that she just loved being in that environment, and then that kind of led her to working in the industry itself. But it was a really roundabout way of kind of getting into your job path for the next 10 years, or however long it’s been, that I found really interesting.

HK: So at about 4:45, I very unfortunately had to leave the class. It is a three-hour class, by the way, but I had a lecture at 5 p.m., so I couldn’t miss the part that I had been looking forward to most, which was the live DJ performance set. But Anya and Tilly, could you tell us a little bit about that performance?

TJ: Yeah, so it was about, I think, week three that we attended the class, so they were getting started with what had seemed to be the basics of DJing. And Professor Paul got on stage, he had all of his equipment set up, and basically just showed a few tracks, showed kind of like the basics of setting up a track. I also, you can tell I do not speak in this lingo at all, so I’m going to sound a little weird, but he was showing how to mix tracks, question mark? And it was really cool. It went on for, I think, an hour. The last hour of class was kind of entirely dedicated to just teaching everyone about kind of the basics of playing things, setting up cue marks, which sounds like –

HK: Okay, sounds like you learned.

AM: Cue points.

TJ: Cue points. I think Anya may have a better understanding, so she can talk more about that.

AM: He did spend a lot of time talking about, kind of, the DJ prep work, which was very fascinating, interesting to see, because I didn’t know how much actually goes on behind the scenes, and how little of it is impromptu. You spend a lot of time prepping out exactly where the beats are going to drop, exactly where you’re going to have these things called cue points, which is like the high point or the beat drop of the cue. And it’s almost like studio time – lab time is what he would call it – before the actual DJ set, to figure out exactly what you want to play, what songs you want to mix. And he kind of showed a lot of the technical side of dropping those cue points and the importance of them. And he made an analogy of a DJ as a pilot flying a plane. So you do a pre-flight check and make sure that everything is good beforehand, which, that was super interesting. So there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes of DJs.

TJ: One of the things that made a lot of sense to me, but I was honestly kind of surprised by, which probably maybe shouldn’t have been, was that they had talked a lot about the difference between streaming the tracks directly from a Spotify or Apple Music, versus how DJs have to download the music. And that was really something I had never talked about, but they talked a lot about how streaming is Wi-Fi dependent, and when you’re doing a set at an event or any location, you really don’t know what you’re going to get. So DJs are always purchasing or downloading the music onto their computers directly. And part of the DJ set that he did, he showed the difference between downloading a track and using a track from Spotify directly, and how there’s a little bit of latency, or the track, when you’re just using it on Wi-Fi, can be slightly buffered or a little bit late. And that was something that was really getting down to the nitty-gritty of DJing that I thought was really cool to see.

HK: Wow, this is all stuff I genuinely didn’t know before right now. So it does sound like you guys learned the basics, which is awesome.

TJ: We definitely learned a lot, and we were literally there for one class. And I feel like, I feel like I could set up a track with cue points now. So what about you –

AM: I think I could drop a couple cue points here and there.

TJ: Yeah.

HK: Okay.

TJ: So at the end of the class, the professor actually came up to us, and he asked what we thought, and we were both just kind of like impressed by the whole thing. It was really cool being around people who were kind of committed to doing music or committed to learning something new. And then we left, and we came back about a week later to interview the professor directly and talk to him about the class. So that’s what you’re about to hear. And we talked to him about just, kind of, questions we had after the day, things about the class. It is a relatively new class, so that was something that we wanted to talk to him about. And we also got to talk to one of his apprentices. These are students who have taken the class before, who are interested in the music industry or going into the music industry. And the apprentice that we talked to was Alexandra Keshishian. She is a fourth-year, and she actually had a really interesting story, because she took this class fall quarter, and then kind of pivoted her entire path into the music industry, which, as a fourth-year, I thought was kind of the coolest thing ever. So we hope you enjoy listening to this next conversation.

TJ: We just wanted to start talking about how long you’ve been teaching this class and teaching at UCLA, and kind of what inspired you to create this class in general.

Professor Paul: That’s a great question. Well, the seeds were planted for the DJs performer course, actually back during the pandemic, and then ultimately, I created a syllabus that needed to be approved by the Faculty Senate, and I have to give a lot of credit to Dr. Bob (Robert) Fink and Dr. Tiffany Naiman. Tiffany’s our executive director, and Bob’s the chair, and they both were excited about the course, and they helped to champion the course and get it approved. And the first time the course was offered was, actually, I believe, in the fall of 2025.

TJ: Oh, okay, so it’s relatively new.

PP: It is. This is our third quarter offering the class.

TJ: And when we met you at the first lecture, you mentioned that the name of the course, The DJ as Performer, was really important to you, as framing it in that way. And I was wondering if you could go into more detail about that.

PP: Yeah, I was very intentional with the course title, and so was the chair, because it’s a performance thing. And also, DJing is so much more than just playing two decks, two CDJs, two turntables or a controller. A lot of DJs that are performers now incorporate drum machines, synthesizers, vocalists, conga players, guitars, brass singers. So I see the DJ as a performer. You know? The DJ as a conductor, the DJ as a record producer.

AM: Yeah, so considering that a lot of the students are new to DJing in the music industry in general, to this course, what are some of the main things that you hope your students kind of take away from this class?

PP: What I hope the students take away from the course is that they are storytellers through music, that it’s a lot more than just the clips that we see from Coachella or big festivals. DJing is really about building community, right? There’s also a bit of storytelling when it comes to DJing as well. Of course, you know, some DJs do play the hits, but I think it’s really easy for DJs to play music that people know. But I don’t know why anybody would want to come and hear a DJ play music they already know. So ultimately, our goal is to get our DJ students to discover music that other people don’t know about, that they’re really excited about, that they want to share with the world. And then the other thing about the course I think is really interesting is, the course is also designed to teach you a bit of business, a bit of marketing, thanks to our apprentice, Alex, she’s also going to be talking about like social media marketing, storytelling, through the journalism and other things like that. So the DJ course is so much more than just DJing. It’s culture, it’s history, it’s building community and it’s also business.

TJ: When we came to lecture, you were talking with the guest speaker, I think Lauren Anderson was her name. You guys were talking about the importance of being a good hang as a DJ, and she was saying that’s so important in the music industry. And I was curious how, if you think that is a skill that can be taught, or if that’s something that you find to be really innate, and you see people kind of naturally excel in the music industry for that reason.

PP: That’s a great question. Well, I would say across the music industry in general – it’s not just about DJing – being a good hang is important.

TJ: Yeah.

PP: So why is that important? Well, it’s because we spend really long days together. We’re traveling together. So ultimately, you want to hang out with people that you like, that are cool, that are chill. And it’s like a soft skill. So is it something you can learn over time? I think that you can, maybe you observe. You know, a lot of people can be introverted in the beginning, but you have to kind of learn how to push through that a bit. I do think it’s something that you can learn. And some people, clearly, are better at the soft skills of communication. That’s because that’s really what we’re talking about here, is communication skills. So it’s body language, it’s being able to read a room, right, knowing when to say hello to someone, knowing when to ask for that picture with that artist or not – and usually the answer is not, especially if you’re behind the scenes – so that, I think that’s something that students can learn over time, and it’s a really important skill to have. And in some cases, I would say, employers in the music industry believe that they can teach you the skills that you need to know, but they can’t necessarily teach you to be a good hang.

AM: Yeah. And then, especially considering the recent few years, and the rise of social media and influencers, what are some of the changes that you’ve noticed, kind of in the industry in the past decade, and how are you implementing those in your class and what you’re teaching to your students?

PP: That’s a great question, because social media has transformed all genres of music, right? Musicians can no longer just focus on the music. Before social media, you focused more on your art, like great songwriting, great producing. And artists were a bit more mysterious in some ways, and it was intentional. Even some of my favorite artists growing up kind of had a bit of a mystique about them. But when social media came along, musicians had to open up their lives to everyone, and, you know, people tend to edit the best of their life and put it on social media. But what I’m finding, at least through my own experience, is artists that are a bit more authentic, you know, about their life, and share challenges that they’re working through and how they’re working through them, I think can help artists as well. I mean, you don’t want to be always negative on social media, by any means, but I think you want to be real. And I think the other important thing about social media is being yourself. My wife, she’s an actress, she’s really good at acting, and she loves becoming someone else. But not all artists are like that. So my advice is, figure out who you are as a person and express that through social media. Because if you try to be somebody that you’re not, it’s going to become exhausting. One of my really good friends is an artist called Birdee that I really love. He’s Italian, so, you know, he loves cooking and coffee. So you know, he’ll talk about cooking and coffee around his DJing and his producing. So I think also, artists just can’t post about their art and their music and their shows. They have to talk about other things as well.

AM: Right? Like, are you a good hang? Like, do you fit with a personality?

PP: Yeah, that’s true. Alex, do you have any thoughts on that, on the social media thing?

Alexandra Keshishian: Yeah, I think that from what I’ve seen, I mean, I’ve been more on the consumer fan side more than anything. And, I’m super immersed in social media, and I’m now making, implementing that into my career aspiration. So I just want to get into business management, marketing, and so much of that is centralized to social media. But I’ve seen a lot of DJs come up, I guess, and get booked these really big shows because of their social media presence. But ultimately, when you go to their sets, or you hear feedback from their sets, they don’t really get great feedback, because a lot of their, I guess, they’re curating for social media and not necessarily curating their music and focusing on their music enough, so people like that don’t tend to last. But then on the flip side, if you’re an artist and you’re making great music, and you’re not putting it out there, no one’s going to see it, no one’s going to know. And then you might not even sell enough tickets, even though you’re great, it doesn’t mean that people are getting to see you. So I think the overall curation and having a balance of both of that is important. You can’t just only rely on being an influencer DJ, because that’s not going to get you the ultimate career that you want if you want your music to be taken seriously.

TJ: What do you think you’ve taken away from this class in particular? And do you think because it’s such a unique class, like, what do you think it really brings to UCLA and the music industry program as a whole?

AK: Yeah, so I’m an English major, so I’m not even in the music industry department. I randomly learned how to DJ in the summer, and then my friend was taking the course, so I decided to enroll in the course. And from taking this course, I basically switched my entire career path, and now I want to work in the music industry, because I realized how passionate I am about it. So I definitely think that this class changed my life, not to, not to, like glamorize it, but that is really how I feel about it. And I think it was just, it’s not only, you know, we’re learning how to perform as DJs, and we perform a set as our final, and that’s so cool, but we were also getting great guest speakers and learning about people in the industry from all the different ends. And I think that’s the most valuable thing, because you’re not, you can go to as much school as you want, but getting to talk to people who actually work in the industry and have that experience and hear how they made their connections, because it is so connections-based. And you know, you never know, maybe you make that connection in that class. So I think that there’s so many different assets of this class that I was able to take and bring into my own life, just like my own confidence, I was able to grow and become more confident with performance, because of my final, so, I mean, it’s like limitless what you can take away from a class like this. I think it’s awesome. And I’m glad that UCLA has stuff like this.

TJ: That’s so cool. I love hearing that you like pivoted everything, especially in senior year. That’s incredible. I love that. I think one of our probably last questions. Since this is a relatively new course, is there anything you think you’ve learned from the past two quarters of teaching it that you kind of want to build on, anything you want to highlight or kind of change going forward?

PP: Absolutely. I mean, every time I teach a course here at UCLA, I want to improve it, right? I learned from every course that we do, and I think early on, because it’s a new class, I probably came in a bit too ambitious with the projects and say, the set time for the final. I come from a generation where, DJing, you played really long sets, but there’s 35 students in the class, and so if I assign everyone an hour DJ set as their final project, that’s just 35 hours of listening. So that was a big lesson that I learned early on, and I immediately had to say, “Okay, it’s a half hour for your final.” And I may even have to shorten that a bit. Now, luckily that I have Brianna (apprentice Brianna Montalban) and Alex to help me out with the class as apprentices, they’re going to help me listen, and they will have the rubric to provide notes, but they can’t officially do any grading, but they can share notes with me, and that’s another thing that I learned with the class, is I need to bring in talented young apprentices to help me.

And one of the things that I want to say – this is not necessarily something that I learned, but something that I’ve noticed as a professor here, especially in the music industry program – is most of our students are women, right? It’s a huge female population, so I’m very intentional about the curation of our guest speakers and artists that come to the class. Minimum, it has to be 50% female artists or more. So that is something that’s really important to me about the class. I would say other things that I’ve learned about the course is that we want to change, even moving forward, is we want to create events that are off campus for the students to perform, and that’s something that Alex is helping me with. We’re talking to different brands and other places. So I feel like as the course continues, it’s going to run this summer, by the way, which is the very first time it’s ever been offered in the summer. So as the course continues, we’re going to look for more creative and cool spaces to have the final exam, right?

TJ: That’s so cool. Is the final exam recorded, or is it in person?

PP: The final exam is a performance on stage.

AM: Oh, wow.

PP: Now, I don’t make every student do it, because some students are introverted, they’re a bit shy.

TJ: Okay.

PP: So in that case, I tell them what they can do is record a video of their set. In some ways, that’s a bit harder because there’s more technology involved to record a video of your set and get really clean broadcast-quality audio. So in some ways, if you don’t perform on stage, it’s a little bit harder, not necessarily by design, but I don’t want to force anyone to be on stage that doesn’t want to be.

TJ: How have you found, kind of – because if this is like your first experience teaching, I guess DJing, in this context – how have you found creating a rubric for it? Because it is like such an art form, and it’s so individualistic that it could be hard to make a general kind of grading guideline.

PP: That’s a great question. And the rubric focuses more on, the first, the first category would be like your audio engineering, because all DJs, ultimately, are some form of an audio engineer. So the rubric is really clear about your recording levels, like you can’t have a distorted recording, right? So that’s one of the first pieces of the rubric that we look at, is, are your levels within spec? We want to make sure that you’re not in the red. Also, you want to make sure your levels aren’t too low. The other part of the rubric is, and this can be a bit subjective, but I have the students write a paragraph or two about what the intention of their DJ set is. Where are we right now? Are we at a pool? Are we in a nightclub? Are we in a warehouse party at 6 a.m.? Are we in the jungle in Costa Rica? Where am I while I’m listening to this set? And did you do a good job of telling that story? And that’s a bit subjective, so we’re pretty lenient with that part of the rubric. And then the last thing I would say on the rubric is, you know, are your transitions good? You know, did you, were you able to successfully beat-match? Did you transition between songs, you know, in a way that makes sense for a performance? And I realize they’re students, and they’re not going to be perfect, so once again, we’re not that hard on them. I feel like overall, this class is probably more work than students think coming in, but I’d like to believe that the work is fun and it’s not that hard, and I do my best to keep the rubric fair.

TJ: From the one day we attended, we were like, this is great. We would love if all of our classes are like this. So thank you so much, and this was great and incredibly interesting to learn.

PP: Of course, thank you for having us, and we invite people that are listening to your Daily Bruin Podcast to come join the class. I cap the enrollment on purpose at 35 students every now and then. We’ll take a few extra PTEs if there’s a senior that’s graduating, but because there’s enough seats in the Lonnie Hall auditorium, we do invite students to come and join us, especially on days when we have guest speakers.

TJ: We’d also like to mention that this class is offered over the summer and going forward in the fall, so if it at all sounds interesting, definitely, definitely sign up for the class.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Sidequest. Stay tuned for our next adventures coming soon on Daily Bruin Podcasts.