Grayson Repp was not supposed to become a DJ. Growing up as the son of a former professional hockey player-turned-coach with a knack for swimming, the Vancouver-born Repp spent his childhood training to become an athlete, and ultimately, he achieved that. After high school, he went to Arizona State University to swim competitively. He was, however, always the music lover on the team: “I was the guy that would make the mixtapes to get all the boys pumped up,” he tells Billboard, a foreshadowing of his career pivot to come. “But I didn’t know why [I did it yet.]”
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It wasn’t until a few Scandinavian teammates put Repp on to the then-burgeoning EDM scene of the late 2000s coming out of Norway and Sweden, including Swedish House Mafia and Avicii, that Repp found his desire to make music himself. “I like to go all-in on things,” he says. “So I retired from swimming, I packed up, I moved home and I spent the rest of my student loan money on DJ equipment… I just mixed in my parents’ basement for a couple of years, teaching myself how to do that.”
Fast forward to after the pandemic, and Repp, by then a professional DJ in Berlin trying to make ends meet, found a new career path: he was asked to curate the music in the stadiums for the FIFA Arab Cup in 2021. “After the tournament, FIFA was like, ‘Hey, we really enjoyed that. Would you like to be this guy that curates the music for us in stadium?’”
Since then, he’s grown into one of the most sought-after sports DJs in the world, creating the playlists for everything from the 2022 World Cup and the 2026 Winter Olympics to the NBA, NFL and F1. “It’s a career path I didn’t know existed,” he said, but it’s the one that enables him to focus on music making full time and it funds his artistic project at the same time.
On this week’s episode of Billboard On the Record, Repp joins ahead of the 2026 World Cup, which begins later this month in major cities across Mexico, the United States and Canada, to explain how he curates the perfect soundtrack for whatever is happening on the field, the track or the half-pipe. Repp also discusses his involvement at this year’s World Cup as the creator of Vancouver’s city theme, which he created alongside musicians from the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
Watch or listen to the full episode of On the Record below on YouTube, or check it out on other podcast platforms here. Read a condensed and edited portion of the conversation below.
How do you prepare for a World Cup game?
It takes a long, long time. I am a big believer in preparation. I can bring this back to my athletic days, and my dad was a professional goaltender… Before the World Cup, I started working on the music playlists about six months in advance, and I was doing it like 10, 12 hours a day because I just really wanted to be overprepared. It’s one of those things where you never know what’s going to happen, and since it’s very regional, I try to talk to the team delegates and some of the players. I ask them “What are you feeling right now? What pumps you up before the game? What are the fans listening to?”
I’ve definitely leveraged using AI in the last couple of years because I’ve always wanted to know… what are the top 50 songs that have been played on Spotify in the last 10 years [for this country]? Then, I can get that data now so I can plug that stuff in.
It’s also just testing that stuff in the stadium as well.
Walk me through a workday during the World Cup. What’s the timeline for you when you DJ one of these matches?
Traditionally I’ll start playing three hours before the game starts. The first hours are just playing for the staff in the stadium. You’re just keeping it very low key, very chill, very mellow, and then you start to get into a little bit more of like the pop hits in the middle hour and then the last hours, just like a power hour. That’s until you go into pre-match protocol, which is about 10 minutes before the match starts. It takes a lot of work, but it is incredibly rewarding.
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You got started with FIFA back in 2021, 2022 in Qatar. I know that there are a lot more cultural sensitivities there. It’s a very conservative country. Were there any songs that you felt like you needed to be careful about playing over there?
Yes, because I did the Arab Cup. So it was a little bit more sensitive because these were Arab countries playing against each other that might have had some sort of hostility at the time. You had to be really mindful that there were like the leaders of these countries in the stadium too. I do my research about the songs and ask my Arabic friends about the lyrics.
This is a generalization but a lot of the music, not all, is very politically driven, so you just need to be really mindful about those things. During the World Cup in 2022, I think the system that we built wasn’t as robust yet. They were kind of like just do whatever and you need to approve it with human rights and anti-discrimination, which was really interesting for me…
So I put together one list of like 5,000 songs, which is a lot. I think they were like, “Oh, maybe we’ll get a few hundred songs to check,” but I’m like, “No, I have 5,000 because I want to be prepared for anything.” Then that group went through all the tracks and they told me, like, “Okay, we can’t play this because the German team might have a chant against the Dutch team that we don’t want to put on broadcast,” or “It might be too sensitive,” or something like that.
I really wanted to make sure that all of the countries and all the continents involved had their fair share of songs playing in the stadium for them. You have to be an open-format DJ to make that possible, but it’s also a challenge to make the mix elegant.
At the Winter Olympics this year you were stationed by the half-pipe and snowboarding events. I feel like snowboarding fans know how to party. How did you approach that experience?
[The Winter Olympics] is arguably bigger than the World Cup for Canadians… The halfpipe was a lot of fun… Some of the athletes were just so incredible to watch live and musically during the actual event because OBS, which is the Olympic Broadcast System, you can’t have music with lyrics. I was playing a lot of instrumentals, so I just pulled essentially all of the music that I was planning to play, stuff that I’ve used in the past, either at nightclubs or at the World Cup, really high energy stuff, and just pulled out the lyrics and just used those instrumentals
The cool thing about the Olympics being in Italy is Europe definitely has a little bit more electronic in their blood. They like to move, they like to dance. You don’t need to go fully pop, they’ll know the underground stuff… It was so cold in the Alps so I realized, “Okay, my job is to keep these people moving.”
How else does FIFA integrate music into the World Cup?
I’ve worked with on the venue entertainment side. So anything that you’re going to hear in the stadium has probably been curated by me in the last five years. FIFA Sound was formed in 2021. And you could say that’s like the in-house label or the section of FIFA that handles music specifically. They do all the commercial releases, so all the official songs will be under their imprint, including the remix package that I did for this year’s World Cup.
Tell me more about this remix you did.
A couple of years ago they said, “Hey, we’re thinking of doing this album for the 2026 theme song. And they said they wanted a producer from each city [hosting the World Cup] to remix it to make the sound of their city, essentially. And they asked me to do Vancouver. I got to work with the indigenous musicians out in Vancouver, and we got in the studio and came up with a song. There’s 15 other amazing versions as well. Those songs will be used, I think, for the commercial spots. So when the players walk on the pitch in Vancouver, it’ll be my song, [essentially.]
You’ve mentioned that you have to get your songs checked by this Human Rights Council to make sure that they are not offensive to anyone. So what are grounds for something being offensive? Is it expletives, political content, or something else?
All of the above. I will put a song into a document, they will go read the lyrics and then they’ll do like a big background check on the artist and make sure that, you know, nothing horrible or they’ve said nothing that would be offensive. Since this is such a global sport, these things have to be checked. Like there’s a couple examples. “Seven Nation Army” was one that they relied on for pre-match ceremony for a long time. In 2022, it was actually used for the first half of the tournament. Then anti-discrimination was like, “Yeah, we don’t think we can use this anymore because one of the teams has come up with a racist chant toward another team just at this tournament.” I think that’s so important when you’re doing events like this because you never know.
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Do you ever get stage fright knowing that there are some of the most powerful world leaders watching you DJ at the World Cup?
I think I was more nervous to do this podcast [laughs]. But back in 2021, resources were slim. It was the first time they had used DJs, so they had a guy in the audio booth that did the pre-match protocol, which is playing the national anthems. That is the biggest deal out of any pre-match protocol. If you mess up an anthem, that is it. So there’s like three days of rehearsals before a big match where we practice all of this stuff over and over and over and over again, and [they] just couldn’t get it right. So they’re like, “Grayson, can you do the anthem?” And I’m like, “Okay, sure.” I had to play the third place match and it was Qatar. So the host and the Emir was about 10 meters to my right — and we know the leaders of these countries that operate a little bit differently — so it was really interesting experience for me. I played the anthem, and I got through it. I actually pressed play and I looked over, he gave me a little smile, and I was like, okay, cool. Then after that, in 2021, I would say all of the nervousness had gone away.
Are there any other things that you’re doing leading up to the World Cup events kicking off?
Just preparation… I’m really focused on my artist project right now. I always say that doing this sports stuff is just what pays the bills for my actual artist project, but they do go hand in hand. So, I have a bunch of music that’s being released… and I’m so grateful for that.
In terms of sports, I don’t have any sporting stuff before the World Cup, but I will be doing three dates at the FIFA Fan Fest, two headline slots, and then I’ll be performing [on the same lineups as] Kaskade, deadmau5 and SG Lewis, which are all heroes of mine. I’m so stoked for that. And then, since I’m from Vancouver, a bunch of the nightclubs that I grew up in [want me to] come play some gigs here… I’m just game to do anything. So I’ll probably have my schedule full with like 20 events or so. I’m really, really excited.
Unfortunately, they’re not going to be using stadium DJs this year. They’ll be using playlists instead. So I’m just going to be in the area and hope that I get a phone call to DJ and [play in] a stadium again, because that’s my bread and butter.
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