By Scott Brandon
(Pictured Above: Stacy Zemon and Grand Master Gee of the Sugarhill Gang)
One day, while shopping for DJ equipment at Dave Phillips Music & Sound in Allentown, Pa., I came across “The Mobile DJ Handbook” by Stacy Zemon. Once I read it, I had an even better understanding of how to run certain aspects of my mobile DJ business. I’ve since read Stacy’s other books, and I am looking most forward to her upcoming release, “The Mobile DJ Entrepreneur”.
During our interview, and I learned quite a bit about this fascinating woman. In addition to being an authority on DJ-related topics, Stacy is also a lover of rescue animals. Her current pets all came from animal shelters, as did mine.
Stacy has been active in the DJ world since the late 1970s. And she will, undoubtedly, continue to be successful. You’ll see what I mean as you read on:
SB: How did you get started in radio?
SZ: I was very fortunate that my high school had a closed-circuit radio station, which gave me a good start. Thanks to that experience, when I went off to Middle Tennessee State University, they allowed me to work on the college radio station as a freshman. Typically, that was not the case. It was a beautiful, very large, 50,000-watt FM radio station with brand new equipment. While I was doing that, I got two additional part time jobs at Nashville radio stations doing both music and news.
SB: Tell us about how you incorporated your radio job with sending out mobile and club DJ units.
SZ: After I’d worked in the business for many years, I wrote “The Mobile DJ Handbook”, whose last chapter was called “Records of Success: Interviews with America’s Top DJs”. By the time I got done interviewing these folks from around the country, and the book was published, I realized I now had the collective knowledge of the best & brightest in the industry. So I started my own multi-system operation with two partners. One of them was a very large, 72-station radio broadcast company. We started as the mobile entertainment division of seven different radio stations in Connecticut and Massachusetts that had different musical formats, providing DJ entertainment for weddings, school proms, etc., through each of those radio stations.
SB: “Mobile Beat” magazine has called you one of the most successful women of the DJ profession. More and more women are becoming DJs lately (which I personally think is great) but would you say it’s still a male dominated field?
SZ: Yes. It always has been, and it likely always will be. But now, thirty-some years after I got started, there certainly are more women in the profession than there used to be. There are also a lot of husband and wife DJ teams.
SB: Tell us a little bit about ProMobileDJ.com.
SZ: ProMobileDJ.com is a free 24/7 educational website geared towards mobile DJ business owners. Visitors will find a knowledge bank of information that helps people learn about the skills they need to grow their businesses by becoming more effective marketers, sales people, managers, etc. This knowledge bank continues to grow by the week. Including me, we have ten contributing writers who are business experts handling specific areas of interest to DJs. We’re always open to folks who want to contribute either single articles because they have something they want to
