Annie Mac is Back on American Radio with a Vengeance

SiriusXM listeners heard a pleasant surprise this past Friday night when a familiar voice, that of tastemaking BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac, popped on on the BPM channel for the first installment of her new weekly show, "Annie Mac Presents."

"It's something I've been building up to for a really long time," Mac told THUMP last month. "I'm really happy about it because since Radio 1 left Sirius it's been really hard to have a regular platform where [American] fans can hear me in real time."

Mac, along with BBC's cadre of selectors including Pete Tong and Zane Lowe, were a staple of North American satellite radio until 2011, when the Radio 1 channel was abruptly pulled from the SiriusXM lineup. While Mac is hardly the household name stateside as she is in her native UK, the US success of artists like Duke Dumont and Clean Bandit—whose records Mac supported early and often—speaks to the transferability of her ear.

"Because of the landscape at the moment, anything can do well," Mac says of the opportunities for dance music. "You can get an accidental No. 1, and then after that you decide what kind of artist you want to be. So if you get a hit then you can go, 'you know what, I'm not comfortable with this' and let it go back underground and your next album can be much more specialist. Or you can choose to be that guy in the same way that Duke Dumont has. He has just gone for it, and why shouldn't he?"

In the past few years, Mac has been going for it too, steadily building her own profile beyond the BBC through her now-annual compilation series, Annie Mac Presents: AMP, and an accompanying UK tour, this year featuring Hannah Wants, Tourist, and Lxry & Monki alongside Mac herself. The tour runs through mid-December and is all but completely sold-out, as is the three-day Lost & Found Festival on the Mediterranean island nation of Malta next April with a Mac-curated lineup including Carl Craig, Green Velvet, Jamie Jones, and Kaytranada. Mac says she also plans to tour the US later that month.

"It's still really important for me to be over there and to be spinning over there, just for the fact that I love coming there," Mac says of America. "It's just always so crazy when you go over and you realize that people listen to your show and are aware of what you do. It just blows my mind."

Mac's new focus on the US, as with all of her projects (including a recent editorial for THUMP), is a natural extension of the Annie Mac brand: passion-driven, music-focused and accessible DJing that shies from the mainstream without being alien to it. While plenty in the industry obsess with algorithms and data, Mac's commitment to sharing good music and championing new talent is rooted in her own taste and instinct about what her audience needs to hear.

"You can go on trend forecasts but if nothing ends up being big and you don't really like what you booked, that's not cool for anyone," Mac says, referring to the process by which she books the AMP tour. "I think that it's really important to be honest and only go with what you like and what you're vibing off of."

"It's hard because you book someone in May or June and you don't know whether they'll even have a record out in November," she mentions, acknowledging how strong this year's AMP lineup is without taking credit for the benefit her stamp of approval has given those on it.

Like the tour, the tracklisting for Annie Mac Presents: AMP 2014 also balances the timely with the cutting edge, the commercial and critical achievements. Cuts from Usher and Sam Smith are decidedly more broad while tracks by Alex Adair and Watermät aren't ones most people have heard before.

"It becomes a thing that's an entry point for a lot of people in the UK. It's like 'okay, I need to get a dance album, I'll get that because it has everything,'" Mac says of the collection. "It's important for me to take that seriously; you have to have the tracks that are popular but it's equally important to have those tracks that people can discover and learn to love."

In many ways, this is the challenge Mac and other British and European standard-bearers have faced with the American market. While there is demand for entry-point music curation, there are also seasoned and knowledgeable fans who can be turned off by a track or an artist once it hits the charts.

"I think that music is fickle; that's just how it goes," she says, with specific regard to dance music audience. "That's what makes it interesting. You never know where it's going to go. It could be sustained for quite a bit more time. I keep thinking it's going to end soon because people are gonna get bored, but nothing has come along to kind of take over this big wave of electronic music."

"I find the whole thing really fascinating, to be honest," she adds. "I don't know where it's going to go or what's going to happen."

For now, that might be as much of a trend forecast as we'll get from Annie Mac.

"Annie Mac Presents" airs weekly on SiriusXM's BPM channel 51 at 9pm EST and on SiriusXM On Demand. Annie Mac Presents 2014 is available now.

Zel McCarthy is THUMP's Editor-in-Chief.