How Ryan Raddon Became the $200,000-a-Night DJ Known as Kaskade
In a testament to their commanding new reach, D.J.’s like Kaskade can earn $200,000 or more for a single night, according to handlers and public records. “In the late ’90s and early 2000s, there was an initial explosion of E.D.M. for a quick second,” said Joel Zimmerman, who created William Morris Endeavor’s electronic-music division in 2008 and works with artists like Kaskade, Deadmau5 and Afrojack. “The thing that really flipped the script was social media. You had kids getting connected in a different way.”
Kaskade himself (let us now call him by his given name, Ryan Raddon) remembers the moment he realized that his chosen genre was no longer an underground phenomenon. It was 2009, and he was playing the main stage at the Electric Daisy Carnival, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
“I remember looking at the sea of people: the whole football field was full,” Mr. Raddon said in an interview at his room at the London NYC, on the afternoon between his two Roseland gigs. Dressed in a hoodie and jeans, he was still groggy at 3 p.m., his ears ringing from the night before. “I just knew this was the beginning of something. There’s no music act that can do this right now — U2, Coldplay. Nobody’s going to put this amount of people into an arena right now.” … Continue Reading
