ON a recent Saturday afternoon in New York, Diplo, the Los Angeles D.J. and producer, was in a bar on the top floor of the Standard hotel, reminiscing about being arrested. He had been invited to New York last year to work with Beyoncé. The first day had gone well.


But that night, “I got in a fight here,” he said, gesturing at the bar. “I got arrested, and I think they kind of lost interest in me or something, because I didn’t show up for the second day of the sessions.”


While he was in jail, a snowstorm kept judges from coming to work the next day, which meant he couldn’t get out. “My bags were just in my room at the Gansevoort for, like, three days,” Diplo said. “They thought I got kidnapped.”


This visit was shaping up to be smoother. In a few hours, Milk Studios was scheduled to hold a party for a new book of photographs by Shane McCauley, “128 Beats per Minute: Diplo’s Visual Guide to Music, Culture and Everything in Between” (Universe/Rizzoli). After that there was an after-party, back at the Standard, some studio sessions — a photo he posted to Twitter late Sunday night showed him posing with Kanye West, the Harlem rapper ASAP Rocky and others — and on Monday, a plane to Las Vegas, where he has a weekly residency at the club XS.


Few currently working in pop music bridges high and low, mainstream and underground, quite like Diplo. He’s a controversial figure who has emerged in the last few years as one of the most dynamic forces in an unsettled industry. The position he’s carved out is unconventional but prescient — instructive, even. He is less an artist or a producer than a negotiator, a collaborator, a generator of interesting coincidences.


In a pop music landscape in which old benchmarks like record sales matter less than they once did, successful artists have had to learn and employ a whole new set of tools. They’ve had to become ubiquitous, online and in real life, occupying new platforms the moment they arrive. They play shows constantly. They are brands — spokesmen, tastemakers, fashion plates — as much as they are performers.


Diplo, more than almost anyone else, appears to have assimilated these lessons. “Climax,” the ethereal single he produced for Usher, is in the Top 20 in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Last year, he was nominated for a Grammy for his work on Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now.” Major Lazer, Diplo’s dance hall duo with the London producer Switch, spent two weeks in April touring Europe. “Express Yourself” (Mad Decent), a solo EP, is set for digital release on June 12. Somewhere in there, Diplo said, he does “about 300” live D.J. sets a year. Last week he announced plans to tour Canada by train.


But Diplo is not just a musician. He runs his own label, Mad Decent, and shelters a host of promising artists under that umbrella. He has deals with Blackberry, Ax and Red Bull. He has regular radio shows on Sirius XM and the BBC. Few artists manage to be so present in so many different worlds. There was a moment during the 2010 Blackberry ad campaign Diplo starred in that his ubiquity was so total that even he had to marvel at it.


“I was in the World Series — it was my face in between commercial breaks,” he said. “I could just lie and say it’s all part of my whole ploy of just making as much nonsense as possible. Doing that, going from Beyoncé to jail to Blackberry to whatever.”


Born Thomas Wesley Pentz, Diplo, 33, began his career putting on parties in Philadelphia in the early part of the last decade, free-for-alls that mixed genres like hip-hop, pop and dance music. Soon he began collaborating with an artist who called herself M.I.A. The partnership ended up making both of them famous: “Paper Planes,” the deceptively winsome track they produced for M.I.A.’s second album, “Kala,” in 2007, sold more than three million copies and was nominated for a record-of-the-year Grammy.


“Paper Planes,” with its soft-hard interpolation of an airy Clash sample and a chorus backed by gunshots, became a calling card, reaching more established stars like Usher, who identified Diplo as a person who could wed traditional commercial sounds and something, as Usher put it, more “alternative.”


After trips to Coachella and the dance music center Ibiza, Spain, “I was really infatuated with the idea of kind of bridging the gap between soulful music and indie music,” Usher said. “And I wanted to work with a producer that I felt like would understand that.”


“Climax,” one of the songs that resulted from their sessions together, was written in only an hour, Usher said. But with its mournful chord progression, squawky bursts of electronics and a bridge arranged by the composer Nico Muhly, “Climax” is a departure for Usher — it’s all tension and no release, the rare pop song that manifests its power through how much it holds back.


“To put those kinds of things together and then make him feel comfortable to write a record like he did, and make it so it’s an Usher record, I don’t think Swedish House Mafia or someone else could do that,” Diplo said, referring to the powerhouse dance music act.


Leah Whisler, an editor who worked on “128 Beats per Minute” for Universe/Rizzoli, said “he’s doing something interesting musically.” But the press, she added, was equally interested in Diplo’s “role as a cultural curator.”


“128 Beats per Minute” illustrates the mechanics of Diplo’s global hustle: there are photos of the producer in Jamaica with the dance hall star Busy Signal, in Mexico with the new-school cumbia artist Toy Selectah, and in Britain with the dub king Lee “Scratch” Perry. “Look at Me Now,” the song Diplo produced last year for Chris Brown, marries Dutch house music and hip-hop; “Express Yourself,” from Diplo’s coming solo EP, pulls textures from dubstep and features the New Orleans bounce artist Nicky da B. Future projects include work with Snoop Dogg on his new album and with the rising rapper Azealia Banks on hers.