About
Kono Vidovic
DJ, music consultant and curator. Almere, Netherlands.
Kono Vidovic is a DJ, music consultant and curator based in the Netherlands, with 34 years of experience programming music for commercial spaces. He builds soundtracks and sonic identities for bars, restaurants, hotels, retail spaces and brands, and hosts the weekly Dirty Disco Radio show.
What I actually do
Most of my work is not performance. It is programming: deciding what a room should sound like at each hour of its trading day, writing that down as rules a venue can follow, and building the music that fills it.
That splits into three things. Custom DJ mixes are sequenced sets built to a brief, used as a venue's music source instead of a streaming playlist. Music strategy is the document behind it: genre palette, tempo bands, volume by daypart, and who signs off on changes. And I still play live, which is where the rest of it comes from.
Background
I started DJing in the early 1990s and have not stopped. That period covers the shift from vinyl to digital, from residencies to streaming, and from music as something a venue happened to have on to something it is expected to have designed.
Dirty Disco Radio has run weekly for years, covering deep house, nu-jazz and Afrobeat. It is where I do the listening that the commercial work depends on. A curator who stops digging stops being useful within about two years.
How I write about this
Two rules govern everything published on this site, because both have been broken in this industry long enough to be worth stating.
No statistic goes in without a primary source. The music-and-retail field is full of percentages that trace back to nothing. Figures like a 9.1% sales uplift or a 38% dwell-time increase circulate endlessly with no paper behind them. Where research is cited here it is named with author, year and publication, and cited by direction rather than by a number I cannot verify. Where a figure could not be traced, it was removed.
A music source is not a music licence. A custom mix changes where your music comes from. It does nothing to your public performance obligation, which varies by country and which you arrange yourself: Buma/Stemra and Sena in the Netherlands, TheMusicLicence in the UK, GEMA and GVL in Germany, and separate ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR licences in the United States. Any supplier who blurs that line is telling you something untrue.
Where else to find me
Work with me
If you run a space and the music is not doing what you want, that is the conversation I am useful in. Start with a custom mix from EUR 249, or get in touch and tell me what your room sounds like now.
