DJ Redness takes over the booth at 511 Franklin on Thursday, June 25, launching a weekly residency at the downtown Tampa venue. The night runs from 9 p.m. to close, with no cover at the door and the resident DJ holding the room through last call. The launch opens a recurring Thursday series the venue is positioning as the start of the downtown weekend.
Behind the name is Adam Evans, the DJ and producer who has performed as DJ Redness since his teens. “I have been a DJ since I was 15 years old, playing nightclubs at 16,” Evans said. “This is who I am.” He bills himself as a Tampa-based DJ and producer known for high-energy open-format sets, national releases with established artists, and a track record of running packed rooms.
Evans got his start with local performances in Fort Myers, by his own account, and built a career that has since spanned clubs, festivals, and radio appearances. Open-format is his signature, a style that moves across genres in a single set rather than locking to one lane. The approach asks more of a DJ than a single-genre night does, since it depends on reading a room in real time and sequencing hip-hop, house, Latin, throwbacks, and current Top 40 into one continuous arc. For a mixed downtown crowd, where the floor holds people who arrived for different sounds, that range is the point.
Beyond the booth, Redness works as a music producer, releasing tracks alongside nationally recognized artists and maintaining a catalog across Spotify and Apple Music, SoundCloud, and Mixcloud. He has built a following across social media, streaming platforms, and live events, according to his own account, and describes himself as an entertainer and nightlife personality as much as a DJ. He also owns a podcast and a music production studio in downtown Tampa, keeping his base of operations within blocks of the Franklin Street room he now headlines.
His path tracks a now-common arc for working DJs, who increasingly build careers across performance, production, and personal brand at once rather than choosing one. By his own telling, what began as a teenager spinning club dates grew into festival and radio work, then into releases and a production catalog, and eventually into the role of a nightlife figure whose name carries the night. The Thursday residency folds those threads into a single weekly slot, where the performer, the producer, and the local fixture are the same person.
That location matters to the pitch. Franklin Street sits at the center of downtown Tampa’s nightlife corridor, a walkable stretch of bars and venues that draws a professional after-hours crowd through the back half of the week. A weekly residency on that strip gives a DJ something a one-off guest set does not: a standing night, a familiar room, and a crowd that learns to expect the same booth on the same evening. Residencies have long been the way club DJs build a local base, trading the visibility of a touring slot for the repetition that turns a night into a habit.
The residency reflects a deliberate choice of venue. Evans describes the move to 511 Franklin as a chance “to bring my beautiful crowd to a beautiful downtown place,” pairing an audience he identifies as young professionals, hospitality-industry regulars, creators, and nightlife enthusiasts with one of the city’s central rooms. That hospitality-insider base is a defining feature of the night. Midweek and early-weekend slots have long served as the service industry’s own night out, the hours when bartenders, servers, and kitchen staff who work weekends finally get a floor of their own, and a Thursday built around that crowd leans into a rhythm downtown workers already keep.
The format on Thursdays stays consistent: open-format sets from Redness, a professional and hospitality crowd, and no cover at the door from 9 p.m. to close. The launch on June 25 will also have the USA-Türkiye match on the screens at 10 p.m., though the residency itself is the draw rather than any one-night event. Bottle service and VIP tables are available through the venue for groups that want a reserved spot on a busy floor.
For Evans, the residency is less a one-off booking than a standing weekly home in a market he has worked for years. The Thursday series continues each week at 511 Franklin, with DJ Redness behind the decks from 9 p.m. to close. Upcoming dates, set announcements, and table reservations run through the venue and the artist’s own channels.
