Martin Garrix Shares His Number One Goal When DJing

As Martin Garrix has become one of the world’s leading DJs, all eyes are on him during his live sets, and it turns out he’s put a lot of thought into exactly what he wants people to feel while he’s up there.

Billboard recently sat down with the young DJ/producer to talk about what his goals actually are when he steps behind the decks in front of tens of thousands of people. Martin Garrix says he likes to arrive early and get a real feel for the crowd before he even starts building his set, then adjusts things on the fly based on how the audience is reacting in real time. That kind of read-the-room approach is honestly rarer than you’d think among top-tier DJs, a lot of whom just run the same locked-in set regardless of who’s actually in front of them that night.

During the interview, Garrix also addressed what happened during his mess-up at EDC Las Vegas, where he accidentally cut a set short before a drop, a moment that went viral for all the wrong reasons at the time. Rather than dodging it, Garrix used the Billboard sit-down to talk through what actually happened, which is a pretty refreshing level of honesty from an artist at his level. Mistakes happen even to the biggest names in the game, and how you address them afterward says a lot.

So what is it that Garrix actually strives for during his sets? “My number one goal when I’m on stage is just to see people smile, and that’s what I do my shows for,” Garrix says.

It’s a simple answer, but it lines up with everything else he said in the interview. For someone who could easily lean into being technical or competitive about production and mixing, Garrix keeps coming back to the emotional side of performing, the idea that a set is only successful if the crowd actually felt something. Coming from someone who’s headlined some of the biggest stages in the world, that kind of grounded perspective is worth paying attention to.

Check out the full Billboard interview below.

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