Solomun began to play at small
Hamburg venues, which paid a few
hundred euros a gig. During this
period, he met several people who
remain his closest friends and advis-
ers, including Daniel Schoeps, his
manager. Within a few years, Solo-
mun and these friends were running
their own club in Hamburg, called
ego, and had founded a record label,
DIYnamic. Solomun’s first releases as
a producer—including his sultry 2009
album, “Dance Baby”—made few
waves outside Germany. The final
track of “Dance Baby,” “Story of My
Life,” is nine minutes long, and com-
bines gritty sounds with a plaintive
chord progression. It’s beautiful. Sol-
omun says that he wrote the track in
a state of “hypnosis” as his father was
dying, of lung cancer, at the age of
fifty-nine. Even now, when the strings
enter on “Story of My Life,” Solo-
mun finds himself in tears.
When he was in his mid-thirties,
his music went international: a stately
remix of Noir & Haze’s “Around” was
one of the most successful dance tracks
of 2011. That summer, he was offered
a gig at El Corso, an Ibiza hotel. A
“party island” seemed to him like a
vision of Hell, but his partners in
DIYnamic persuaded him to go. Sol-
omun played at the club for a few hours,
then spent the rest of the weekend ex-
ploring. He was overwhelmed by the
pristine beaches and by the openness
of the music scene. The following year,
Solomun was playing sold-out parties
at an Ibiza club named Sankey’s. Back
then, he was still enamored of R. & B.,
and his specialty was what he called
“slow house”: bass lines were funky and
sensual; dancers swayed their hips rather
than pumping their fists.
Around this time, Pacha was in tur-
moil. The Urgell brothers were mak-
ing more than twenty million euros
every summer, but they were outraged
by the fees being demanded by the top
d.j.s on their roster, including David
Guetta and Swedish House Mafia.
They also hated the music. In 2011, Ri-
cardo Urgell lamented the “monoto-
nous sound and volume” of the club
scene, adding, “It’s bodies squeezed to-
gether, it’s a little masochistic.... The
great defect of this music is that it has
to be accompanied by drugs.”
The Urgells’ views appalled Pacha’s
booker, a Brit named Danny Whittle,
who revered house music and believed
that the rise in d.j. fees was justified.
There were now dozens of subgenres
of house and techno, each with a de-
voted following. To outsiders, and
sometimes even to fans, the differences
among subgenres can seem infini-
tesimal. (Explaining the gap between,
say, deep-house and tech-house can
make one feel like Polonius offering
Hamlet actors for “pastoral-comical,”
“historical-pastoral,” “tragical-histori-
cal,” and “tragical-comical-historical-
pastoral” plays.) But Whittle under-
stood that clubbers were fiercely loyal
to d.j.s whose tastes matched their own.
As he saw it, a headliner was worth a
fifth of an evening’s gross: if a night
regularly made half a million euros, as
some at Pacha did, the d.j. should be
paid a hundred thousand euros. In 2012,
the Urgells ordered Whittle to reduce
d.j. salaries. Whittle quit, as did four
of the club’s top d.j.s.
Pacha was suddenly desperate. Steve
Hulme, who took over booking after
Whittle resigned, began chasing Sol-
omun for the 2013 season. Hulme felt
that Solomun would thrive in Pacha’s
Sunday slot. “It was the kind of musicgirls liked,” Hulme remembers. “There
was just a vibe about him—there was
a vibe about the label, the name Sol-
omun was really cool.”
Hulme made Solomun’s team a
“massive offer.” Solomun’s manager
asked for “a little bit more.” A deal was
struck. Solomun loathes talking about
money, and he forbids associates to dis-
close his earnings. But a knowledge-
able person who worked in Ibiza’s clubs
told me that Pacha paid Solomun two
million euros for twenty shows in the
2013 season. (The source noted that
Solomun had to pay his +1 d.j.’s fee,
and his own expenses.)
Solomun’s fame has grown dramat-
ically since then, and he now com-
mands much higher sums. He plays
about a hundred shows a year. In
the course of his career, he has surely
earned tens of millions of dollars.
Schoeps said that, although Solomun
is rich, money has never been a sig-
nificant motivation. When pandemic
lockdowns ended, Solomun supported
venues by playing shows for free. Un-
like other d.j.s, Solomun has also de-
clined all paid branding opportuni-
ties, which could have multiplied his
wealth, because he preferred to be
known only for music. Solomun told“Before there was the Internet, Grandpa didn’t know
that he was right about everything.”