Martin Garrix had a UK number one at 17 with a track that has almost nothing in it. I’m a producer, not his biographer, so this post covers the story quickly and then spends its time on what I think other producers can take from it.
The story in brief
He was born Martijn Garritsen in 1996 in Amstelveen, in the Netherlands, and learned guitar at eight. In 2004 he watched Tiësto play the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics, decided that was what he wanted to do, and downloaded FL Studio. That detail makes me smile. FL Studio is the program that used to be called FruityLoops, which is what I was making loops in back in 1998. Same software, very different results.
He signed with Spinnin’ Records in 2012. “Animals” came out in June 2013 and reached number one in the UK that November. After that came “Tremor” with Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike in 2014, “In the Name of Love” with Bebe Rexha in 2016 and “Scared to Be Lonely” with Dua Lipa in 2017. He topped DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs poll for the first time in 2016, and in 2021 he made “We Are the People”, the official song of UEFA Euro 2020, with Bono and The Edge.
Leave things out
“Animals” is an instrumental. The only voice on it is a low spoken line that appears twice. The drop is a kick drum and a blunt, percussive lead, and that’s nearly all of it. Before anyone knew who’d made it, the track was played anonymously, and people guessed at much bigger names.
The lesson I take is about subtraction. Most of my unfinished tracks have too many ideas in them, and the fix is usually to delete. One clear idea, given room, travels further than five good ones fighting each other. I go through how I try to apply that in how I build an EDM track.
It’s also worth noticing that the melody wasn’t new. Garrix has said it came from an unreleased track he’d written two years earlier. Keep your old project files.
Know who owns your music
In August 2015 Garrix announced he was leaving Spinnin’ Records over a conflict about the ownership of his music. In 2016 he started his own label, STMPD RCRDS.
I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the details of his contracts. The general point holds for anyone, though. The deal you sign when you’re unknown is the one you live with when you’re not. Read it, and get someone qualified to read it too. For most of us the stakes are smaller, but the question of who owns the recordings is the same.
Don’t stay where you started
Big room, the style “Animals” belongs to, rose quickly and then drew a lot of criticism for sounding the same. I’ve written about that stretch in how EDM’s sound changed from 2010 to the early 2020s. Garrix didn’t wait around in it. Within three years he was writing pop songs with vocalists, and he’s used other names for music that doesn’t fit the main project: the duo Area21 with Maejor, and the aliases Ytram and GRX.
I think that’s the hardest lesson to copy, because the thing that worked is the thing everyone asks you to repeat. A side project is a cheap way to try something without betting your main name on it.
What you can and can’t copy
A number one at 17 is not a plan. A lot had to line up for him, including the timing, the label and a festival scene hungry for that exact sound. What’s repeatable is the habits. He started young, finished tracks, kept his old ideas and moved on when a sound was done.
He also seems to have handled the attention well. He’s a festival headliner who has put his name to charity work, and in 2017 he was named an international friend of SOS Children’s Villages in South Africa.
My own path looks nothing like his. I came back to production seriously in 2016, the same year he launched his label, and I make progressive house and trance for a much smaller audience. Tiësto is one of my influences too, and I’ve written about him and the other artists who took dance music from raves to radio. The lessons above don’t depend on scale, which is why I keep coming back to them.