Gigs & business
Support act
A support act plays before the headliner, building the room toward them. The job is explicitly not to peak — it is to leave the room warmer and more populated than it was, and ready for someone else.
In practice
Leave the room warmer and ready for someone else. An opener who peaks has spent energy that was not theirs.
Find out who you are opening for and roughly where they start, then plan to arrive just below it. Stay recognisably in the same world without playing what they will play — checking their recent sets takes ten minutes and prevents the single most awkward outcome, which is playing a record the headliner had planned. End cleanly and on time, hand over well, and resist the temptation to finish on your biggest track.
Just below
Where to arrive
10 min
To check their recent sets
Not your biggest
How to end
Where these come from: Booking and slot-craft convention, not a catalog figure. For what we can measure, see the craft of the slot.
Why it matters
It is the most frequently misunderstood slot in DJing and the easiest one to fail by doing well. An opener who plays their biggest records to a half-full room has spent energy that was not theirs to spend, and the headliner arrives with nowhere to go — which everyone in the building notices except, sometimes, the opener.
Done properly it is also the most reliable route to more work. Promoters rebook openers who understood the slot far more readily than ones who impressed and misjudged it, because the first is rare and the second is not.
Frequently asked
What should a support act play?+
The same world as the headliner, arriving just below where they will start. Checking their recent sets prevents the worst outcome — playing a record they had planned.
Should I finish on a big record?+
No. The energy is not yours to spend, and a headliner arriving with nowhere left to go is a problem everyone in the room hears.
Does playing the slot properly get me rebooked?+
More reliably than impressing does. Openers who understand the job are rarer than openers who play well.
Related terms
Warm-up
A warm-up is the opening stretch of a night — slower, quieter, and built to leave the next DJ somewhere to go. Playing peak-time records in a warm-up is the oldest mistake in the job.
Headliner
The headliner is the billed act a night is sold on, playing the slot the room is fullest for — usually peak time rather than the last set of the night.
Handover
A handover is the moment one DJ stops and the next starts — the logistics of it, not the mix. Sticks come out, headphones swap, someone finds a channel, and the room hears whatever happens while that goes on.
Set time
Set time is the length of the slot a DJ is booked for — the number that decides everything else about the set, from how many records fit to how fast the energy can move.
Explore: Opening for a headliner · Warm-up · Headliner · All DJ terms