Anton Zaslavski, better known to burgeoning hordes of fans as the DJ/producer Zedd, got his stage name as a matter of convenience.
As a middle-schooler in Germany, he often sat next to a good friend who shared his first name. When the teacher would call on Anton, they’d both answer. So they simply started referring to each other by the first letter of their respective last names–Zaslavski went by the European “zed” and later tacked on another “d” to make his moniker stand out.
“At that point I didn’t really expect any sort of success,” he says, reclining in a suite at the Dream Hotel in New York. “I didn’t even think whether that name was good for marketing, that was way ahead of where my head was. I just thought it’s a name that people can remember and that was pretty much it.”
Over the past 12 months he’s played more than 150 shows as a DJ, pulling in somewhere around $20,000 per show; he’s also produced tracks for the likes of Justin Bieber. FORBES estimates he earned $3.5 million last year.
Not bad for a diminutive 23-year-old who was still technically living with his parents until only a few months ago. Zedd was born in Russia and moved to Germany at age three, growing up in the German city of Kaiserslautern (he recently rented an apartment of his own, but has been traveling so much he hasn’t had a chance to stay there yet).
At the behest of his parents (his father is a guitarist and a schoolteacher; his mother is a piano instructor) he started playing classical music at age four. But he didn’t enjoy playing sheet music and memorizing theory. When he was 12, he started playing drums in a band with his brother. In his late teens, he discovered French electronic duo Justice.
“I just thought it was really great-sounding, from a sound design aspect,” he says. “And musically, it was just really interesting, and I had no clue how to do that.”
So he decided to teach himself. With nothing more than a home computer, he started crafting his own soundscapes and began putting his compositions online. In 2011, he sent Skrillex a message on MySpace: “Hey, 99.9% of the EDM scene sucks, you’re the last bit that does not, you’re awesome and you’ll like my music.”
The DJ quickly replied, listened to Zedd’s work and connected him to his agent, eventually bringing him on tour. Shortly thereafter, Zedd raised eyebrows across the industry for his remixes of songs by the Black Eyed Peas and Diddy. He also landed a remix track on the deluxe edition of Gaga’s Born This Way, paving the way for his inclusion on her latest album.
“The difference between her and maybe a lot of other artists is that she is way more opinionated and knows what she wants rather than other artists, [who] probably don’t write any of their own music,” he says. “I have not worked with the whole world yet, but I have heard a lot of stories about a lot of artists who don’t know anything about music … she’s a more of a musician than just a singer.”
The flurry of activity earned him a deal with Interscope, the record label to which Gaga is signed. As Zedd’s profile grows in tandem with his work on ARTPOP, he’s becoming yet another example of the ever-shifting role of the electronic musician due to the many hats he wears: DJ, performer, producer, songwriter.
“I personally see myself as a musician in the first place,” he says. “You know, I don’t want to say I will be a producer and DJ for the rest of my life. I can totally see myself being in another band in five years, if that’s what my heart and soul wants to do, if that’s what will make me happy I’m totally happy to just not DJ anymore.”
In the meantime, though, it seems he’s not going to leave the booth anytime soon. He’s got 100 shows planned across five continents through the end of the year, and as the demand for electronic music concerts in America continues to grow—particularly in Las Vegas—he should have little trouble continuing his upward trajectory on the earnings front.
Ask him about that, and his response will mirror that of many other musicians: “I’m not making the music because I want to make a million dollars or I want to make a big hit … I make the music that I make because I love it.”
Seven-figure earnings are certainly a nice side effect—and they seem set to become a regular occurrence given the number of people who now know Zedd’s name.
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