The answer, pure and simple -- and as it usually is in Las Vegas -- is that they generate a lot of money. According to industry trade publication Nightclub & Bar, which publishes an annual list of the top-grossing nightclubs in the nation, in 2014 no less than eight of the biggest revenue-producing clubs in the U.S. were on the Las Vegas Strip, with Encore's XS and Hakkasan at MGM, #1 and #2, respectively, each generating in excess of $100 million, something which no club had ever done before. It's a clear indication that the whole EDM (Electric Dance Music) phenomenon, which began back in the '80s and early '90s with the house/deep house scene that emanated out of Chicago (and quickly spread across the U.S. and to Europe, with its massive illegal "raves," and to Thailand and Goa, among other places), isn't going away anytime soon.
To quote an article from Music Times magazine from July of last year, "Many media outlets, Music Times included, put undue emphasis on the negative news from EDM festivals, and forget about the huge positive economic effects that the genre's moneymaking machine has on local communities. For example, the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas cemented its status as the world's largest music festival thanks to 400,000 attendees and the $322.3 million total economic impact that Billboard projected that it brought to the city, $158 million of that total consisting of attendee spending. Do a little math and that comes out to about $395 per concertgoer, and that's not counting what they paid for their entry fees."
It was back in 2012 that Forbes magazine began publication of its now-annual "Electronic Cash Kings" list, detailing the highest-paid DJs in the world, in the most recent of which it had this to say of Calvin Harris, the top earner to whom you refer: "Born Adam Richard Wiles, the former grocery-store stocker earned $66 million in our scoring period, playing more than 125 gigs. He's found great success in the pop world, working with the likes of Rihanna and Kesha, which has helped him land headline gigs not only at EDM-focused events but also at festivals like Coachella. Harris continues to play regularly in Las Vegas where he has a multi-year deal at America's biggest nightclub, Hakkasan."
That little biography points to one thing about today's DJs that sets them apart from the vinyl spinners of yesteryear, in that disc jockeys traditionally were merely the vehicle that introduced songs to the public by playing them on the radio or in discos, and while they had a significant role in popularizing a tune/artist, they weren't creators in their own right, nor where they typically producers or collaborators on the tracks they played. The EDM era ushered in the trend both for remixes of already popular songs and for DJ creators in their own right -- Calvin Harris, who hails from Scotland, saved up from that supermarket job, and from working in a fish-processing factory, to buy the equipment that launched his career from his MySpace page. Having been "discovered," in 2006 he signed publishing and recording deals with EMI and Sony BMG, respectively, and the following year released his debut album, "I Created Disco," from which the first single released was titled "Vegas," appropriately enough. He now has four albums to his name in addition to working on hits with numerous other artists, most notably Rihanna, with whom he's twice performed world tours.
The same holds true for other big-name DJs like Dutch-born Tiësto, #3 on that Forbes list, who has six studio albums to his name, in addition to a bunch of remixes, a number matched by French-born David Guetta who, at #2, earned some $37 million in 2014 by playing 30 gigs in Las Vegas while also holding down a weekly residency on the European island of Ibiza (among other things). While the figures they earn may seem ludicrous to the layman, today's megastar DJs are showmen who entertain festival and nightclub crowds that were undreamed of back in the day (Guetta's Coachella appearance was topped, numbers-wise, only by the crowd that witnessed the resurrection-by-hologram of Tupac), while often undertaking a pretty grueling travel schedule. In fact it all proved too much for Swedish-born Avicii (#6, at $19 million), evidently, who recently cancelled all of his remaining scheduled Las Vegas gigs at XS and Encore Beachclub, plus appearances in Japan and China, because he was worn out and needed to "take a break after a busy festival, tour, and production schedule." Poor thing. (We noted that in his official statement, the 25-year-old also admitted that he needed to "grow up." No comment.)
