A Playlist Can’t Read the Room.

A slow song can fill a dance floor.

That couple had watched slow songs empty the dance floor, so naturally they concluded that slow songs were bad for a party.

But imagine a dance floor that has been going hard for 40 minutes.

People are hot. They’re thirsty. Some have gone to the bar. Some are outside. A few people who were dancing enthusiastically ten minutes ago are now standing at the edge of the floor talking.

The energy is beginning to decline.

I have a choice.

I can pretend I haven’t noticed and throw another enormous dance-floor anthem at them.

And then another.

And another.

Or I can acknowledge what the room is already telling me.

People need a minute.

A well-timed slow song gives them one.

But something else happens too.

People who haven’t been dancing suddenly have a reason to come onto the floor.

Parents. Grandparents. Couples. People who might not have cared about the last 20 minutes of dance music.

Suddenly the composition of the dance floor changes.

And when the slow song ends, I’m not necessarily starting again with the same group of people who were exhausted five minutes ago.

I have a new dance floor.

Now the question becomes:

That’s DJing.

The slow song wasn’t a failure because some people left. It may have been the thing that allowed the dance floor to regenerate.

This was essentially the opposite problem from the Spotify wedding.

At one wedding, nobody was controlling the music.

At this one, everybody was controlling the music.

Neither worked.

Because everyone fighting for an aux cord is reading the room from their own perspective.

Someone thinks: You know what everybody would love right now? This.

And they plug in their phone.

Then someone else thinks: No, no, no. You know what would REALLY get this party going? THIS.

Someone wants disco. Someone wants hip-hop. Someone wants country. Someone wants the song they used to listen to with the bride in university.

And any one of them might be right.

That’s the funny part.

The individual ideas might all be excellent.

The problem is that nobody is responsible for the whole.

Someone has to be responsible for the whole.

I love requests.

A request tells me something about the person making it, the people they’re with and, potentially, the room.

Sometimes someone walks up and asks for something I hadn’t considered, and I immediately think:

YES.

They’ve just given me a better idea than the one I had.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean I play it next.

Maybe I need three songs to get there.

Maybe I need ten.

Maybe I played something similar 20 minutes ago and need to hold their request for later.

Maybe the song is perfect, but the timing is wrong.

Or maybe the person requesting it has spotted something happening in the room that I haven’t noticed yet.

DJing isn’t about proving that I know more about music than the people at the party.

It’s about taking all of those inputs and deciding what to do with them.

Someone has to be responsible for the whole.

I once received a must-play playlist from a couple before their wedding.

It was fantastic.

Banger. Banger. Banger. Banger. Banger.

There really wasn’t a bad song on it.

There was just one problem.

They were all trying to do the same job.

“All gas, no brakes” sounds like an incredible party.

For a little while, it can be.

But try keeping your foot on the accelerator for several hours.

Eventually, people get tired.

And when the dance floor starts thinning out, the instinct can be to reach for an even bigger song.

Then an even bigger one.

You start burning through the records that should have been enormous moments, desperately trying to recover an energy level that the room simply cannot sustain indefinitely.

This is where something slightly counterintuitive happens:

Not because the songs aren’t good.

Because there’s nowhere left to go.

A peak only exists because something came before it.

Think about the shape of a great night.

There are peaks. There are valleys. There is tension. There is release.

There are moments when everyone loses their minds.

There are moments when people groove.

There are moments when everyone sings.

There are moments when half the room goes for a drink.

And that’s okay.

Because a peak only feels like a peak in relation to what came before it.

If everything is at 10, then 10 stops feeling like 10.

It becomes the baseline. A plateau.

Sometimes the right record isn’t the biggest record I could possibly play.

Sometimes it’s an eight.

Because the eight makes the ten that follows it feel enormous.

That doesn’t mean deliberately playing bad music.

It means understanding that songs have different functions.

• A groove record can hold people without demanding anything from them.
• A familiar singalong can completely change the type of energy in the room.
• A disco record might bring another generation onto the floor.
• A hip-hop record might change how people move.
• A tempo change can reset the room.
• A slow song can give everyone permission to breathe.

And then, when the moment is right…

you hit them again.

Now the banger feels like a banger.

An emptying dance floor isn’t always a failing dance floor.

This may be one of the strangest things to explain about DJing.

My goal isn’t necessarily to keep every person on the dance floor for every second of the night.

In fact, trying to do that can be counterproductive.

People need to go to the bathroom. They need drinks. They want to talk to people. They want some fresh air.

At a wedding, there might be people ranging in age from eight to eighty-eight. They are not all going to want the same thing simultaneously for five straight hours.

So people come and go.

The dance floor breathes.

What matters is what happens over time.

If 20 people leave the floor during a song but 15 different people replace them, did the song clear the dance floor?

Technically, some people left.

But I might look at the room and think:

Perfect.

Because now I have somewhere new to go.

Your playlist is incredibly valuable.

None of this means I don’t want a playlist from the couples I work with.

Quite the opposite.

I want to know what you love.

Your playlist tells me things.

It tells me what you listened to growing up. It tells me what you listen to now. It tells me whether you want to hear disco, punk, house, Motown, hip-hop, indie rock, country, pop or all of the above.

It tells me which songs remind you of university. Which songs your friends will scream. Which songs your family will recognize in three notes.

Which songs are yours.

That information is enormously valuable.

But a list of great songs and a great party aren’t the same thing.

The playlist gives me ingredients. The party is what we make with them.

If you’re choosing music for your own wedding, my Wedding Music Planning Guide explains how I use those choices throughout the day.

The question isn’t “What song should I play?”

This is ultimately the difference between selecting music and DJing.

A playlist asks:

A DJ should be asking something slightly different:

Those questions sometimes produce exactly the same answer.

Sometimes the perfect choice is the biggest, most obvious song imaginable.

Sometimes it is the song someone requested five minutes ago.

Sometimes it is buried in the couple’s playlist.

Sometimes it is something I hadn’t thought about until I looked across the dance floor and saw a group of people reacting to what was currently playing.

Sometimes it is a song I have played hundreds of times.

Sometimes it is a weird left turn.

Sometimes it is a slow song.

There isn’t a formula.

Because the room isn’t static.

It changes every few minutes.

And every song I play changes it again.

That’s the part a playlist can’t anticipate.

The best song isn’t necessarily the best song.

I’ve spent a lot of my life collecting music.

I have an enormous library.

But having more songs isn’t what makes someone a better DJ.

Neither is having access to every hit ever recorded.

Everyone has access to an almost unimaginable amount of music now.

The interesting part is deciding what to do with it.

The job isn’t to play the greatest songs ever made one after another.

It isn’t to prove how obscure my record collection is.

It isn’t to impose my taste on a room.

And it isn’t to blindly follow a predetermined list.