Hardwell Won The Best International DJ Award and Got Booed
For years now, Carl Cox has more or less been Ibiza’s reigning king. So when the 20th anniversary of the Ibiza DJ Awards rolled around and Carl Cox found himself up against a stacked field — Dixon, Richie Hawtin, Solomun, Sven Vath, Eric Prydz, Martin Garrix, Deadmau5, David Guetta, Armin van Buuren, and Hardwell — for Best International DJ, it felt like it was still his to lose.
The Ibiza DJ Awards, now in their 20th year, are voted on by a mix of industry figures and yearly attendees, spanning categories from Best Techno DJ to Best International DJ to lifetime-style honors. They’ve become one of the more closely watched end-of-season events on the island, if only because the winners tend to spark exactly this kind of reaction.
It wasn’t Carl Cox’s night, at least not in the category everyone was watching. When the results came in and Hardwell was announced as this year’s Best International DJ winner, the room didn’t exactly celebrate. According to multiple outlets who covered the ceremony, Hardwell’s win was met with audible boos from the crowd — a reaction that, by most accounts, had less to do with the quality of Hardwell’s set and more to do with Carl Cox’s decades-long status as an Ibiza institution being passed over on his own home turf, on the award’s 20th anniversary no less.
While Carl Cox didn’t walk away with Best International DJ, he wasn’t shut out entirely — he took home Best Techno DJ instead, which at least kept the night from being a total loss for the island’s longtime favorite.
As of this writing, Hardwell hasn’t publicly addressed the crowd’s reaction to his win. It’s worth noting that awards-show boos are a strange kind of controversy — they say plenty about audience sentiment in that specific room on that specific night, but they don’t necessarily reflect on Hardwell’s career or his standing with fans more broadly. The former #1 DJ in the world has had a complicated stretch over the past couple of years, and reactions like this one tend to get amplified accordingly, fair or not.
Source: MixMag
