The electronic underground promises a space of freedom, and many trust that promise. Almost two years ago, an artist who had built her career inside that circuit realised something that made her leave: the freedom had turned into a trap of self-control.
This piece comes out of that specific gesture, out of the suspicion that it isn’t an isolated case. And out of a study on mental health among independent musicians that reached us.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll define ‘underground’ as the community that moves outside the mainstream — independent, self-managed, connected to art out of a genuine need to create. We know there’s an underground entirely disconnected from social media, one that rejects visibility altogether. We also know ‘underground’ has become a brand, a consumable aesthetic. This article is about what sits in between: spaces where the intention is real, but the system has already moved in.
THE QUESTION FEW ASK OUT LOUD
Yulav, a Russian artist and DJ who had built a career across Berlin, China and her own country, decided to leave the underground circuit for good.
She stopped curating electronic music online, the thing she was known for. She lost followers, or rather her audience shifted. That was the cost of abandoning the narrative that defined her. Once she saw that the community was an ecosystem where suffering gets ritualised without ever being resolved, she broke the pact — the idea that if you suffer, you’re authentic.
“Art and music circles, especially underground, are torture for your mental health,” she said in one of her videos.
The comments that came back said much the same. One person wrote: “The scene attracts people who are dealing with problems, and they feed off each other’s problems.” Another: “After I left, I realised there are people who chose not to focus on that, and they feel real, healthy and thriving.”
During the pandemic, many musicians decided to go all in on music. When everything shut down, they confronted what they actually wanted for the first time. Yulav was part of that. Then came the return, and with it the economics. Some, like her, could choose to walk away. For many others that option doesn’t exist. The question is how many more are in that position.
RESEARCH FROM UNIVERSIDAD ACADEMIA DE HUMANISMO CRISTIANO
Researchers at Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano (Daniel Klauser, Roxana Molina and Rodrigo Torres) asked themselves the same question. What they found is that the experience repeats too often to be explained case by case.
According to Record Union, roughly 73% of independent musicians have experienced negative effects on their mental health. Three out of four.
The diagnosis converges with recent international research. Kegelaers et al. (2022) on electronic music artists, and Musgrave, Gross and Carney (2024) in “When Music Speaks”, confirm that the picture Klauser describes isn’t isolated but structural. The same pattern shows up across different geographies and populations.
THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM
A producer works 8 hours at something that isn’t music, to pay for his life. Then produces for 5 hours at home. Then manages his socials. Sleeps little. Wakes up and repeats. And the feeling of freedom appears, because nobody is forcing him.
In the underground, the artist doesn’t feel like a precarious worker. He feels like an entrepreneur. It’s what Mark Fisher called “Capitalist Realism”: the sense that capitalism is the only possible system, so pervasive it becomes invisible.
A Pete Tong DJ Academy survey (2025) of 15,000 DJs found that 61% believe social media now matters more than musical talent. The algorithm decides who stays in the game.
One of the artists we surveyed for this piece put it bluntly: “It’s something I hate doing, that I barely understand, and that I’m not good at either. I don’t like playing that game… The results are minimal or none, unless you invest a lot of money, and even then, there’s no guarantee of anything.”
And here Klauser names it: what looks like individual vulnerability is, in fact, a colonised subjectivity. The market operates so efficiently that artists no longer feel exploitation as exploitation. They feel it as personal freedom, as a project of the self — and that’s the danger: when you don’t recognise you’re being exploited, you can’t resist.
Byung-Chul Han describes it as the trap of modern psychopolitics: how capitalism colonises subjectivity, turning it into a permanent project of optimisation. “The self as a project, believing itself freed from external constraints, subjects itself to internal ones: the permanent demand of performance.”
The artist believes she’s free. But many of those decisions are already conditioned from within. No boss giving orders. An algorithm doing the seducing. Far more effective.
SELF-EXPLOITATION AND ITS PRICE
The underground circuit sells what the commercial industry can’t: authenticity. Real community. Creative freedom. That exists.
But it comes with an economic trap holding the whole thing up. The underground doesn’t invent those conditions: it inherits them from an already precarised music and labour market. What it does is give them a shape of its own — its community, its identity, its sense of belonging.
Yulav arrived in Berlin looking for exactly that. She found experimental collectives, DJs who didn’t sleep because they were too busy producing. Nobody spelled out the price: working for free, living off savings, side jobs, scattered gigs that never add up.
Involuntary precarity, and the dream that it would end.
An artist operates with no contract, no job security, no guaranteed minimum fee. With fear and uncertainty.
According to Pirate Studios (2021), 85% work full-time or part-time in another sector while trying to build a career. Some reported playing 62 gigs a year on top of a regular job.
It’s 4am, editing reels from the last gig. The next one is booked for Saturday. Forty-eight hours away. No rest in between: waiting for the next stream to get more views than the last, waiting for someone to share it, and so on, waiting.
This isn’t simply a financial inconvenience. It’s permanent fragmentation: no boundary between work and life, no spatial or temporal limits to the job. That produces something deeper than “just being tired”: the sense that it’s never enough, that you’re always falling short, that your worth is never complete.
On Spotify, each stream pays roughly €0.003. An artist with 10,000 monthly streams makes €30. It all goes to the next trip, the next piece of gear.
And according to the Musosoup Census 2024, 72% of artists spend more money on their creative practice than it generates.
Which means: you invest your entire life in something that never balances financially. And the illusion you hold onto is that it will balance “soon” — next gig, next stream. For many, that moment never quite arrives.
Jepson et al. (2025) confirms that social media pressure is the single most significant factor in musicians’ poor mental health. Working 18 hours unpaid, without rest, ends up feeling normal. It doesn’t look like exploitation when it’s your identity.
When a community can’t sustain its artists economically, shared suffering can end up working as belonging. And then leaving is dying: you don’t just lose the gigs, you lose the only place where you feel part of something.
Yulav saw it clearly: “When you’re in this community, you feel seen, understood, and your wounds don’t heal — they get covered up.”
THE INVISIBLE CLASS
The underground circuit works like a social anaesthetic. And it only works that way for those who can pay the financial and emotional price.
The invisible class becomes obvious when you look at who gets to stay. Plenty of artists move to Berlin with a safety net: money, visas, contacts. They can survive without a single paid gig. For them, precarity isn’t a problem — it’s more of an aesthetic.
For artists without that net, it’s a real risk. Playing for free for two years is a bet if there’s family behind you. Without it, it’s two years of debt.
Precarity has specific dimensions that work together: unstable income, multi-activity (you work whatever job you can get), multi-employment (several badly paid gigs), no labour protection, social devaluation (your work as a DJ isn’t seen as “real work”).
And the environment rewards exactly that: those who can afford precarity as an aesthetic.
The same study found that 62% see the industry as a “closed club” where access is determined by external factors, not just talent. Social capital opens doors. Visibility keeps them open.
In our survey of artists and visual artists across Ibero-America, most said gigs reach them through colleagues and people in the scene. A minority through social media. Almost none through specialist websites. Nobody through newsletters. Contacts aren’t an advantage: they’re the channel.
This doesn’t describe the whole scene, but it does describe a pattern widespread enough not to ignore.
Only those who manage to pay for their mental health end up staying in the circuit. The rest disappear.
SELF-MEDICATION AND THE WAY OUT
Julian Muller, DJ and producer, puts it well: “The techno scene moves fast. BPMs climb, flights blur into afterparties, and burnout is just part of the routine. But what happens when the body can’t keep up with the industry’s relentless pace?”
“Touring means no sleep, inconsistent meals, and an overstimulated brain running on pure adrenaline. There’s no time for reflection when the next gig is always around the corner.”
And then: “You can’t pour from an empty cup. If we don’t start looking after ourselves, the community won’t survive either.”
NAINA, a London DJ and label boss, went through burnout: “It’s hard when you go independent. You can be buried in so many projects that you forget to take time off. But you have to experience a burnout to avoid it again. You find out your limits.”
For her, rest wasn’t surrender. It was survival.
There’s a way out when we allow ourselves to stop. When we let creativity be a way of processing rather than something that burns you down.
Interventions exist, but many arrive late — and independent musicians can’t afford them: 54% cite money as the obstacle.
Self-medication isn’t an individual pathology. It’s a rational response to conditions with no way out. When you work without protection, without a contract, without certainty, when your mental health depends on an algorithm, when the only community that understands you is the same one destroying you — what alternatives do you have?
In that context, drugs and alcohol end up being more accessible than therapy or than a labour contract.
Muller and NAINA’s accounts point to the same things: job stability, contracts, minimum fees, affordable therapy. Spaces where vulnerability isn’t the currency.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know what to do. It’s that doing it would mean turning the underground into something that would no longer be underground.
Whose responsibility is it? Who do we turn to?
The system survives because there are people trapped in it. And we, every time we consume without asking ourselves anything, help hold it up.
THE SYMPTOM
Yulav’s honesty is uncomfortable because it exposes the mechanics.
But here’s the central contradiction: many of the qualities that make the scene valuable — risk, intensity, radical experimentation — emerge precisely in that context of instability and vulnerability.
The underground produces the best because it produces the most fragile. And fragility, sometimes, destroys.
Can those things be separated? Should we try?
Yulav said: “I think you can do more, go further, go deeper and see how life reveals itself to you.” That’s an invitation to a different kind of creative career.
When she says she prefers “lighter music and art that comes from knowledge and peace”, she’s rejecting the equation that says you need to suffer to be authentic.
“I don’t like underground music, it’s too depressing. My lifestyle changed drastically.”
Her decision made something visible: that for many others, leaving is impossible. Not for lack of courage. But because the environment has become the only thing that defines them.
For them, walking away means walking away from their identity.
The community that can destroy you is also the one that understands you without you having to speak. And out of that same exhausting precarity comes an intensity you won’t find anywhere else. Plenty of the people inside know this. They stay anyway.
The question that matters is whether the underground can react in time — and whether, in doing so, it would stop being what it is. Because “the underground” is all of us: the people who programme, the people who play, the people who dance. There’s real power in the hands of curators, bookers and promoters. Many of them walk between both worlds: big festivals and resistance from the squatted house. They hold the filter in place, even unintentionally, even in good faith.
Some are already moving. Eme DJ (Marta Fierro), Spanish DJ and producer, launched “Depresión en la Cabina“: sessions on mental health in the underground scene, breaking the silence.
When we asked what keeps them going, the words that come up most aren’t money or recognition. They’re creativity and community. Someone wrote that DJing lets them express a part of themselves they can’t find anywhere else.
That’s what the scene produces, and it isn’t produced the same way anywhere else. The problem was never the community: it was community used as a replacement for payment. When we asked what they’d value from a platform, the lowest thing on the list was brand discounts. Among the highest, curated spaces and the community itself. They’re asking for infrastructure, trust and safety.
The most revolutionary thing that can happen to the underground is seeing that the trap is visible, and still being able to choose how to respond.
SOURCES AND REFERENCES
BASE RESEARCH
Klauser, D., Molina, R., & Torres, R. (2024). Problemática de salud mental en músicos independientes. Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano.
THEORETICAL ANALYSIS
Fisher, M. (2016). Realismo capitalista. Editorial Caja Negra.
Han, B. (2021). Psicopolítica. Herder.
Pérez Soto, C. (Cited in Klauser et al., 2024). Analysis of contemporary hedonism and the reduction of music to “product for instant consumption” on social media.
INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH
Kegelaers, J., et al. (2022). “Performers of the night: Examining the mental health of electronic music artists.” Psychology of Music, 50(1), 69–85.
Musgrave, G., Gross, S., & Carney, D. (2024). When Music Speaks: Mental health in the Danish music industry. Partnership for Sustainable Development in Music.
Loveday, C., Musgrave, G., & Gross, S. (2023). “Predicting anxiety, depression, and wellbeing in professional and nonprofessional musicians.” Psychology of Music, 51(5).
Musgrave, G., et al. (2025). “Working in the Content Factory: Musicians’ social media use and mental health.” Frontiers in Psychology, 16:1542407.
Jepson, R., Sims, M., Ravalier, J., & Brougham, R. (2025). “Exploring the Mental Health Challenges of Music Industry Professionals: Recommendation for an Industry-Wide Code of Practice.” Sage Journals. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20592043251394824
INDUSTRY RESEARCH
Pirate Studios (2021). Mental Health Survey of 1,500 DJs. DJ Mag, August 2021.
Musosoup (2024). Musician’s Census 2024: Independent Musicians Face Market Oversaturation and Financial Uncertainty.
Pete Tong DJ Academy (2025). Survey of 15,000 DJs and Producers on Electronic Music Industry Challenges. Presented at International Music Summit (IMS), Ibiza, April 2025.
TESTIMONY AND COMMUNITY
Yulav (artist, DJ) — Posts on leaving the underground scene. Instagram, 2024-2025.
Julian Muller (DJ, underground producer) — “Mental health, Lyme disease, and the responsibility of DJs.” Playful Magazine, 2025.
NAINA (DJ, label boss, London) — Accounts of burnout, limits and rest as survival. 2021-2025.
Eme DJ / Marta Fierro (producer, DJ, Spain) — “Depresión en la Cabina” initiative on mental health in the underground scene. 2023-2025.
South Plug. Sectoral Research: anonymous survey of artists, producers and visual artists across Ibero-America.
