Rafael Araújo: The Man Behind 27,000 DJs and Music Producers. And The List Is Growing.

Mr Rafael Araújo created a school and a whole education system for DJs to become professionals and for music production to be accessible to people.

AIMEC celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2024. It’s five times awarded the Best School of DJs and Music Production by the Rio Music Conference and Brasil Music Conference, the largest conferences in the electronic music market in Brazil, between 2011 and 2016.

Mr Rafael Araújo, as co-founder, started the first school with good equipment, few small rooms but good teachers and a streaming show for their students. That being done in 2004 was new! Today he’s CEO of one of the most respected DJ and music production school in the world. AIMEC has its learning process and materials with units in seven cities in Brazil and one in Portugal and is working on expanding the brand in the United States.

Latin American Dance Music Business has grown significantly according to the International Music Summit in their most recent report. Bright-eyed with this market and with AIMEC’s know-how, the prestigious UCLA – University of California – invited Mr Rafael Araújo – the leader of the AIMEC community and the only founder who is still involved –  to be a guest professor for UCLA’a own DJ and music production course. About the invitation, Mr Rafael Araújo comments: “Justin Paul, professor at UCLA, knew our work and that’s how the invitation came about. I hope we can do it in the future”.

Araújo, who was also invited to join the Brooklyn Digital Conservatory – the only Brazilian in a select group of professionals in the digital music market from around the world in New York – bets on the growth of AIMEC in the United States. Outside Brazil, the school has a unit in Lisbon, Portugal.

“It is a very promising moment because now this large market is opening up to more avant-garde and conceptual art, fertile ground for artists, festivals, record companies and why not schools? That’s why I realize that there are great opportunities for AIMEC here across the United States“, states Mr Rafael Araújo.

 

 

The Dance Music Industry reached a value of 8.2 billion dollars in 2021, according to the International Music Summit that releases annual reports. This industry showed growth after the pandemic in sectors such as face-to-face events, and overall, the market that grew the most was Latin America, with 13%, with Brazil being the engine of this equation. According to the same report, worldwide 30,000 artists make the base of the industry work and around eleven million “casual artists”.

In 2011 Mr Rafael Araújo produced music under the name Cupcake and released a track with Kolombo, Let’s Party, by Nervous Inc. The AIMEC’s CEO has an entire career built in the entertainment industry, from DJing in nightclubs in the 2000s to producing major events for over 10,000 people to phonographic labels and radio programs. Mr Araújo holds a bachelor’s degree in Radio, Television and Multimedia from Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná. Mr Araújo was honoured twice by the Curitiba City Council: once in 2006 as a Young Entrepreneur and another in 2019, on the National Day of Culture. According to data from AIMEC, the CEO is the leader of a process that has already helped build the career of more than 27,000 students: “educating and guiding them to make their dreams come true and build a career within the professional electronic music market. in Latin America and Portugal”, as he comments.

The professionalization of new artists proved to be a promising market and today a reality, concludes Mr Rafael Araújo: “Today we have schools in eight cities, two countries and in these almost 20 years, year after year more people are interested in music as a profession and we are ready to collaborate in this process, both in Portuguese and in other languages”.