Interview with DJ Amani Roberts

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the multifaceted Amani Roberts. Amani Roberts is a Washington DC born-and-bred creative graduate of Howard University, who has been a DJ since 2008.

Amani currently lives in Los Angeles, California, and is the chief musical curator for his entertainment and production company, The Amani Experience. He is a partner and streamer on Twitch and produces four different live streaming shows weekly. Amani has produced remixes of numerous popular artists and hosts and a weekly podcast called The Amani Experience Podcast, where he interviews creative professionals from all over the world about why they took the leap from corporate to the creative life. Amani is also an adjunct professor at Cal State University, Fullerton, teaching entertainment, and money management in the School of Business and Economics, and the co-director of the Center for Entertainment and Hospitality Management. Amani recently graduated from Berkeley College of Music in Boston with a Master’s in music business, which is something he’s very proud of.

Amani’s first book, DJs Mean Business: One Night Behind the Turntables Can Spin Your Company’s Success, was released in April of 2020.

Need a break from reading articles? Want to just listen instead? Below is a transcript of Episode 28 of my podcast, Stand Up & Stand Out. If you’d prefer to listen, head over to our website or find us wherever the cool kids hang out that do podcasts!

When Amani was in college, he had decided that he wanted to be a DJ because he saw Bismarck, who had a club… but it didn’t seem like a real profession. Back then, he was used to the traditional nine-to-five, white picket fence, a dog, 2.5 kids concept, so he didn’t think of DJ-ing as a real job.

However, in every city, he would go check out the DJs; watch, absorb, and discover. Finally, when he got out to California, he dared to try it on the side. He started teaching himself and DJ-ed a couple of clubs at Hermosa and Santa Monica.

One of his friends told him to check out Scratch Academy DJ school. Amani went to Scratch Academy twice. First time for deejaying, then for production a year later. He just kept adding to the DJ resume, then started teaching at Cal State University, Fullerton.

When people ask me where I’m from, it’s kind of a confusing question for me, too, since I’ve moved so much, but I think it’s great to be able to experience lots of different places like that. Especially through music, because music is so closely tied to the history of places and people. You learn a lot more about a place when you go out into the environment and really start absorbing some of that.

Amani learned a lot about freestyle music in Chicago, which was popular back in the day and is kind of having a re-emergence. He was a hotel manager, but many of his staff would bring in mixed tapes for him to listen to.

Then, in Miami, he learned a lot about Latin music: salsa, merengue, and bachata. In DC, vocal music is king. He’s learned and absorbed a lot of music wherever he’s lived.

Amani’s favorite part of his uniqueness is that he brings almost 20 years of hospitality experience to his business, which helps him stand out.

Now he has the new skill of live streaming, whether it be on Twitch or YouTube, so he can add that to his offerings. And then the backbone of it all is that he’s a professor. He’s a teacher at heart. Amani loves to teach people, to guide people. Those aspects kind of help him stand apart and also help him wake up in the morning because he’s trying to figure out what he’s going to learn today. What does he have to teach today? And then what is he going to play today? Those things will keep him motivated for a long time.

Amani comes from a long line of educators and music educators specifically. It puts him in a different mindset to every day, where he’s trying to learn so that he can share his knowledge with other people. As you’re trying to teach, you also have to make sure that you know enough to share something

He got into streaming during the pandemic because he needed something to do. He would live stream his podcast interviews on Facebook, and then he added Twitch because he would teach about Twitch in his Cal State, Fullerton class. Once he started to use it for the podcast, he would DJ one day a week on it, and then he added another day. Then DJ Flossie and her friend were doing a 30-day challenge. So he joined that, but it turned from 30 days into 54 days, and that’s where Twitch took off for Amani.

He did a talk show where he and his friends taught how to use Twitch. Then they did some game shows. At first, it was like Survivor, where you have five different artists and vote them off. Then they did the brackets, like the best 16 Prince songs or Stevie Wonder songs. In October 2021, they did an amazing award show, and now he recreates game shows from his childhood and allows people to play them from all across the country. Amani offers these as entertainment to help warm up or break up what can be difficult to get through corporate meetings. He says that being a talk show host is fun, and he’s getting better and better.

Amani is also a partnered streamer on Twitch, which is a hard achievement. Only 0.1% of all streamers on Twitch get to partner. His students geek out about it. It helps with the marketing and helps with his resume.

Amani thinks it’s necessary for anyone who’s marketing their business or services. It lets people get to know you more intimately than what they see in a prepared video or Instagram post. Then you have interaction on the chat, guests coming in, and you start having authentic conversations because there are no edits.

You do have to learn about being a producer, coordinating, writing, and casting. There are a lot of life skills you learn through the process.

I created my Stand Up & Stand Out podcast because there wasn't much to do in the middle of the pandemic. And I really liked it. I liked the form. I liked being able to connect with people again. I wanted to have one-on-one conversations versus being stuck in giant zoom meetings.

I have gotten to know my guests and continue to network with them through joint ventures and other stuff behind the scenes here at Green Chameleon Collective. It’s been super fun. I always relate it to the early days of Comic-Con when they sold comics, and you got to meet the artists.

Podcasting and streaming are like that. It’s about artistry. It’s about the creative element of it. It’s not about the business. That part comes because we all have to pay the bills, but that’s not the core reason we do it and keep doing it.

Switching from Marriott was a big deal. Amani just wasn’t happy anymore. He was stuck in meetings and doing spreadsheets, but he loves to work with people. It was a tough decision because he had to decide to walk away. He was maybe five years from getting Quarter Century Club, which has free hotel stays around the world based on availability, but he wasn’t happy. So he had to decide to step away and start DJ-ing full-time. That was tough because he took a significant pay cut, and it took him a while to get back to that level.

He recognized quickly that it’s wise to have multiple income streams. You don’t want to depend on one company for your revenue because there can be layoffs, consolidations, etc. So when he was figuring things out, he read that the average millionaire has seven different income streams. So he decided to get seven strong streams of income. That was a huge mindset. It’s what he’s been working on ever since.

The teaching helps out with steady income benefits. And it fits well with the DJ lifestyle because you can grade papers in your free time, and you’re able to travel and do different DJ gigs.

His message to students is to pursue the career you want, but create some things on the side that you love that can bring in some revenue and teach you some new skills. He always tells them to create a side hustle and share it often because it makes them more marketable.

Be a lifelong learner. It’s important that once you finish school, you never stop learning. Don’t be scared to go and try to learn new things. Those are some of the messages Amani loves to share with students.

I think this will also become a pivot of how education works. Being able to sit down for four years and study one thing and do that forever is unrealistic because technology is changing. The nature of business itself is changing too fast. We’ll have to rotate between working a few years and then going back for a year or two of study.

They’re picking up these kinds of side jobs so that they can start to build those skills in a realistic way. We begin by learning in the classroom, but you must apply it to ensure you understand how to make it work. I often ask new employees how to solve problems when there isn’t a textbook to give them the correct answer.

Amani is always willing to help people and share his knowledge with them. He feels that if we learn together, we can be stronger. His superpower is helping people grow and bringing them along. They always say that when you go through the door, make sure you return and bring one or two people with you. That’s a motto that Amani tries to live by. He loves to work with the youth and volunteers at a DJ camp for kids and teaches them how to DJ and do music production.

I think it’s crucial to reach back to that younger generation. Many of them struggled during the pandemic more than some of us who had our careers established. They thought they would go to university and have all these social experiences, then all of a sudden, it goes away. They lost their network, which helps us bridge that next gap into adulthood and figure out who we will be when we grow up. I love that Amani is spending time with the students in many different facets to help them.

You can find Amani Roberts at Amani Experience. He’s also on Instagram. If he has a performance in your city, he will post that. The book, DJ’s Mean Business, can be found at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you’re getting a lot out of these blog posts! You can find more from me on my YouTube Channel or Spotify! I’m also always available by email at nikki@TheNikkiGreen.com, and the website for the Green Chameleon Collective is https://thenikkigreen.com/.