Restless: What DJ Yonny Taught Me About Reinvention

I started this site back up to chase something. Tech and music, the two things I love, and what happens when you actually bind them instead of picking one. Some weeks that looks like sourcing a record. Other weeks it looks like sitting with a podcast episode until it won’t let me go.

This week it’s the Heavy Hitter DJs Podcast. L. Boogs, Kast One, and DJ Wallah sitting down with DJ Yonny, and by the end of it I had a page of notes and a reason to write this.

No product connection here. No CTA at the bottom pointing you to a crate. Just a story about a DJ who kept blowing up his own comfort and starting over, because that’s the exact kind of story this platform exists to tell.

DJ Yonny: Restless. Heavy Hitter DJs Podcast.

From the Booth to the Boardroom

Yonny’s path started in New York radio, on Power 105 and La Calle at the same time, doing double duty as a young DJ still cutting his teeth. When Star lost his platform and rebuilt from scratch, he pulled Yonny in as executive producer of his new morning show, dance and EDM leaning, a genre Yonny had never really lived in. Yonny took the job on one condition: he needed his own mix show too. He got it, and he ended up scratching and blending over dance records in a way that reintroduced a whole hip-hop audience to a genre they’d written off.

That could have been the whole career. It wasn’t even the first act.

Chasing the Room, Not the Check

By his own account, Yonny hit a ceiling in New York. Every club he dreamed of playing, he’d played. Every slot he wanted, he had. And somewhere in the middle of living the dream, it started feeling like a job he was clocking into rather than a life he was building. So he walked. Moved to LA to chase production, not DJing, and ended up in a studio with Poo Bear on what was supposed to be a quick meeting. That relationship turned into records for major pop artists, and taught Yonny a lesson he keeps repeating to the DJs he mentors now: send tracks from outside the room and nothing happens. Be in the room, and everything changes.

In LA he also built Breakfast in Vegas, a party brand that pushed urban and Latin music into rooms that had never mixed the two, at a time when that combination barely existed on the West Coast. It grew into a real movement before it got oversaturated the way every good idea in nightlife eventually does.

The Business Behind the DJ

Here’s the part I think upcoming DJs need most: when the club money dried up, Yonny didn’t wait it out. He got into short-term rental arbitrage in Las Vegas, leasing units and running them as income while the DJ calendar filled back in. It wasn’t glamorous, and at one point he was living out of his own recording studio and showering at a 24-hour gym to keep the business afloat. That business is what carried him through COVID and eventually funded the move to Colombia, where his grandmother lived and where he’d go on to build a second career as a producer inside the Afro-Latin and reggaeton scene.

He’s since become a voting member of the Recording Academy, the body behind the Grammys, nominated by peers in the industry. And now he’s teaching. Coaching other DJs and producers on the exact transitions he’s made himself, because he realized the knowledge he was giving away for free in conversations with other Heavy Hitters was worth building into something real.

Why This Matters Here

I’m not going to stop chasing written interviews with DJs. That’s still the goal for this platform. But there’s no reason to let a story like this sit on the shelf while I wait for the next one to land. The Heavy Hitters have been doing this work in podcast form, and DJ Yonny’s episode is exactly the kind of thing I want this audience pointed toward: a DJ who kept reinventing himself, said no to money that didn’t fit the brand he was building, and diversified every time the ground shifted under him.

If you’re a DJ, a producer, or anybody trying to figure out your next move, give this one a full listen. It’s worth the time.

Read our Collector Spotlight with DJ Kast One for more on the Heavy Hitters.