About music4dance

Is music4dance becoming too popular?

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I first published music4dance in 2013 and, within a year or so, started seeing traffic measurable in the thousands of active users per month. Usage plateaued there for over a decade, but last year, the numbers started climbing rapidly – into ranges better measured in tens of thousands. Now these are very rough measures from analytics, and there are some conflating issues which I’ve noted on my tech blog if you’re interested. And, very importantly, there has been a steady increase over the years of highly engaged users – those of you who vote on dances, email me with issues, and generally keep me mostly in line with dance knowledge.

In any case, the issue at hand is that music4dance has never paid for its own server costs, which has been fine with me in the past, because I get enough out of running the site that I am willing to cover the server costs, and I count my time as well rewarded by the support of the community. However, running a site open to the public has the quirk that expenses can be unbounded as traffic scales, or conversely, the site can slow down as traffic increases.

Music4dance has both of those problems. I haven’t done the engineering work to allow all resources to scale with usage. So things will slow down as more people use the site, possibly to the point of making it unusable, depending on the number of users and what they are doing. On the other hand, some resources are unbounded, such as network traffic costs, so I’ve seen costs spike.

Now, this would all be good if revenue scaled with usage, as an order-of-magnitude or more increase in revenue from both ads and subscriptions would not only cover current costs but also let me put in place some of the things that make a site scalable. However, revenue is not scaling at the same pace as traffic.

Ad revenue has grown by less than double, and since it’s only ever covered a small fraction of my costs, that’s extremely disappointing. I suspect that many people have ad blockers running, and I recently noticed that running my browser in incognito mode appears to act as an ad blocker, so many people may just not be seeing ads. Besides, ads uglify the site.

Subscription revenue has increased over the last year (thank you, everyone, who has subscribed or renewed, I really appreciate the support). And also thank you, everyone, who has spread the word and helped create the “problem” I’m dealing with now – please keep it up; the last thing I want is for usage to go down as the solution.

Given those two factors, I’m going to put on my (very shabby) marketing hat and start moving the site to a purely subscription-based model rather than the current hybrid ad and subscription model. Let’s see what we can do about getting some of the wonderful dancers who use the site regularly to add a premium subscription to music4dance to their budgets. To this end, I’m reducing the number of pages that show ads and replacing them with an obvious (but hopefully not too annoying) plea to create an account and upgrade to a premium subscription. If this works, I’ll eventually remove external ads completely.

Why am I telling you all of this?

  • If you are a premium subscriber and start seeing new messages asking for your support, please let me know – that would be a bug. My promise to premium subscribers to keep the site ad-free for them is intended to include this kind of “internal” advertising as well.
  • If you aren’t a premium subscriber yet but get something from the site, please consider subscribing.
  • If you find these nudges annoying and would prefer to support the site in another way (or already are), please get in touch with me. For instance, I had considered writing code to drastically reduce the number of nudges for folks who cast many votes or add many songs per month. But I think we can accomplish this manually for now, and I’ll write the code if it becomes an issue (and would be very happy to do so).
  • Since this whole line of reasoning is based on server load, please let me know if you’re seeing significant sluggishness when using the site. I’m especially interested in which pages you notice and when this happens. I am working on ways to reduce those issues without drastically increasing costs, and I can be more effective in my efforts if I have actual reports of sluggishness.

Thanks again to everyone who is already contributing to music4dance in one way or another. I hope this wasn’t too in the weeds of the business of running the site. I promise next time to get back to some fun features of the site or to an observation about music and dance.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And, as previously noted, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Searching for Music

New Feature: Go to Page (or I want to get to the 50th page in 77 pages of Waltz results)

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One response to a recent post about Advanced Search options was:

One thing I would like on the website in general is: I am someone who is slowly making my way through all of the dance music selections for the dance styles I’m interested in. I would like it very much if there was a way I could go directly to the page at which I stop instead of having to navigate slowly to the page I want. For example, if let’s say I stop on page 50, and when I return to the task again at another time and want to start on page 51, it takes many clicks to get there.

I responded with ways to hack the URL to reach a particular page in search results, and I still think saving the URL via a browser bookmark or your note-taking system of choice is probably the best answer to the specific question.  The URL encodes all of the details of the search, including the page that you’re currently on, so you get right back to where you left off.

However, the pagination system is a feature I implemented in 2012 and haven’t revisited1 in detail since. At the time, the default pagination control that came with the UI library I was using worked perfectly well for the at most dozen (and generally more like two) pages of search results. That’s obviously not the case anymore.

I have been noodling with moving to an infinite scrolling system. This is the way many sites have moved to when presenting search results, and it would solve some other issues I’ve been having with limitations of the core indexing system I’m using. So, besides nudging me towards a more obvious way to go to a specific page in the search results, this comment may have stopped me from investing in an alternative scheme that would have made this even harder. Thank you!

I am going to continue to think about this some more. Including options like making the “my searches” list encode the page that you were last on. I don’t want to keep the page as a core part of the saved searches, since I want to show you the searches you do most frequently, but this shouldn’t prevent me from keeping a separate field for the most recently visited page for each search.

But the absolutely straightforward answer is to replace the textual indication of what page you’re on with an editable number. I did that, so now hopefully new users can easily get to a specific page in their results without digging too deeply.

Image of search results footer with editable page number

Just type the page you want to in the edit control, press Enter/Return, and the new page will load.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

  1. Ironically, I’ve re-implemented the exact same system a couple of times, once when moving to Vue.js, and again when moving to Vue3 and BootstrapVueNext. Even more ironically, getting the pagination control to work correctly in BootstrapVueNext was my first major contribution to that project… ↩︎

What is Your Favorite music4dance Feature? (2024 Edition)

I am in the middle of another substantial rewrite of parts of music4dance.net. This is why you haven’t seen much blogging or new features recently. Sorry! In any case, I should ask this question at least once a year: What do you like about music4dance, and how do you use the site? As I rework…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

What is Your Favorite music4dance Feature?

I’m in the middle of doing a substantial rewrite of music4dance to modernize it and, hopefully, clean up the code enough that I can start adding new features without breaking things.  I had originally intended to keep all of the functionality of the site as I moved forward.  But this has been a bigger undertaking…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Advanced Search

The advanced search form can be found by clicking on the “Advanced Search” item in the “Music” menu or by clicking on the “Advanced Search” link on the song list page. Text Searching If you want to search specifically in certain fields, you can click the “more” button in the keywords section and get some…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Searching for Music

The Dancers I DJ for don’t enjoy long songs. How do I find good Salsa songs that are under three minutes?

3 Comments

Filtering on song length is one of the most requested/appreciated features from the DeeJay/Music coordinator crowd. It’s also one of the first features I implemented in a round of requests I received from exchanges from this segment of the music4dance community – you can read about that in this post.

Since then, it has come up quite a few times, mostly as a “hey, this is one of the things I really love about music4dance,” and once or twice as a “it would be great if you implemented this feature,” in which case I get to gently (but gleefully inside) steer the questioner to the “Advanced Search Page.”

Advanced Song Search Page

I’m bringing this to your attention now because I originally implemented this feature on the cheap. I’m only letting one filter between a minimum and a maximum number of seconds (which is what I store internally). Since it is such a recognized feature, it occurred to me that it might be time to put a little polish on it. My original idea was to have a minutes/seconds control for the minimum and maximum, since that’s probably what the humans are thinking in – that way they don’t have to translate to seconds. It’s not like they can’t do the math, but if this feature is widely used, I should make the experience smoother.

Which leads me to some questions, especially if you are a DJ or music coordinator (formal or informal):

  • Would you prefer to filter on minutes/seconds rather than seconds?
  • Do you use sorting on length? (I didn’t even remember that for certain that I had enabled that until I checked) It seems that if you were to use that feature, it would be good to include the length in the results table, right?
  • Is there some other aspect of searching, filtering, or sorting on song length that could be improved?
  • Are there any other related features you would like to see when building a playlist for your dance?

And some questions for the rest of you:

  • Do you use this feature – possibly in a different way than I described, for different reasons?
  • Can you think of other things you’d like to be able to search, sort, or filter on, or in a different way?

And for everyone – since at least some part of the community has been interested in the filter on song length feature and didn’t find it without asking, any thoughts on how I could make it more obvious?

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

New Feature: Filter by Song Length

If you’re trying to get a playlist together for a social dance, it would be nice for the songs to be a reasonable length for your audience.  I realize that DJ tools will let you manage this in multiple ways, but sometimes it’s just easier to start with songs in the length range you’d like. There are…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Advanced Search

The advanced search form can be found by clicking on the “Advanced Search” item in the “Music” menu or by clicking on the “Advanced Search” link on the song list page. Text Searching If you want to search specifically in certain fields, you can click the “more” button in the keywords section and get some…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Search like Google Part III: Advanced Search – The Best of Both Worlds?

Update (July 2024): This underlying search mechanism described in this series of posts is still in place and functions as described here, but the user interface has changed. Please see the Simple Search and Advanced Search documentation for how the current user interface works. I’ve just updated the music4dance site with the remaining features for…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
About music4dance

Ask music4dance: When was this song added to the catalog?

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Someone recently asked me to add a feature that shows when a song was added to the music4dance catalog. It turns out this feature already exists, but the fact that this person didn’t realize it means it isn’t as obvious as it should be. This is especially true, given that the questioner demonstrated she was a fairly sophisticated user of the site through other questions and comments in the same thread.

I have some ideas for how to expose this functionality, but I’d like your feedback before I dive in. I’d also like to get a sense of how interested you are in this information and how you’d like to use it.

What I have:

I’ll start by mapping out what I’m keeping in the database. In my internal format, I keep a record of every time a song is changed, including who made the change and (of course) what the changes are. It is too expensive to index all this information, so it is available on the song’s detail page, but only a few things can be quickly looked up for filtering and sorting the song list. These are as follows:

  1. The date that a song is originally added to the database
  2. The most recent date on which the song was modified (including by the system)
  3. The most recent date on which a song was edited by a user
  4. The most recent date that someone took the time to enter a written comment on the song

What you can do with it:

The easiest way to use this information (other than looking at the change log on the song’s details page), is to go to the New Music page. This will let you see the most recent songs based on when they were added, changed, or commented on. I find this useful as a quick check to see whether people (and bots) are successfully adding and making changes to songs. If the things at the top of the changed list are more than about a day old, it’s a good indication that I broke something. I also think this is good for users who are looking for new music to see what’s up – but now that I’m looking at that page with fresh eyes, I feel like it could benefit from filtering by dance style, like the Holiday Music and other similar pages.

Image of the new music page

To go to the next level, you can open the Advanced Search page and search/filter a song list any way you like, including by dance style, and then sort it by “When Added”, “When Modified”, “When Edited”, or “Comments.” Modified and Edited are subtle variations on Changed, which I’m not going to dive into here, but feel free to play with those and let me know if you think I’m just adding complexity for no reason.

In general, the last column in the desktop version shows information about the date you’re sorting on. The only indication I’m giving on smaller screens is the order in which the list is presented.

Where to go from here:

Between the original question and writing this post, I have had a number of thoughts about what I would improve. But please pause for a moment before you read on, as I’d like your ideas unpolluted by my ramblings.

  • Add some indication of the sort-ordered date on mobile.
  • Make the information that is shown about songs in the search results list configurable – possibly separately for mobile and desktop (this one would be part of a larger project).
  • Add dance filtering to the New Music page. And/Or add an “advanced search” button to those pages that pre-populates the advanced search form.
  • Distinguish between Modified and Edited on the New Music page.
  • Provide the option to view the full edit history on the song details page.
  • Add the ability to filter between two dates for any of the indexed date types (e.g., I want to see all cha-chas that were added before 2015)

Publication date of a song:

When I first read the message that prompted this post, I thought I was being asked to show the date the song was published. That’s a question that I’ve been asked quite a bit, and the answer is that it’s harder than it seems. In general, people are asking for the date the song was first released as a single or on the first album it appeared on. But since the data I have access to is often a “Best Of” or “Ballroom Mix” album, and the date I can see is the album’s, not the song’s, I haven’t figured out a way to reliably get the information we want. This may be a matter of hooking up to another music database like MusicBrainz, but that’s a pretty big lift, so it’s not part of my immediate plans.

However, I have used various sources to tag songs with the decades they’re associated with; this is more of a fuzzy style idea than anything to do with the song’s release date, but that’s often what I want: 70’s Cha Cha or 50’s Slow Foxtrot.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Song Details

The music4dance song details page contains all of the information that we have gathered about a song, including tags and dances that you have may have added. Below is a snapshot of a song details page for “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” as seen by a user “Charlie” while he is editing it.…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Advanced Search

The advanced search form can be found by clicking on the “Advanced Search” item in the “Music” menu or by clicking on the “Advanced Search” link on the song list page. Text Searching If you want to search specifically in certain fields, you can click the “more” button in the keywords section and get some…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Searching for Music

Ask music4dance: How do I find a song that people can dance West Coast Swing and Foxtrot to, or Cha Cha and Rumba, or…

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Some of the most vocal members of the music4dance community are folks who either DJ for their studio’s dances or help build the playlists for their community dances, or some variation of the two. The common thread is that they’re using music4dance at various points in their processes and have been kind enough to share the details with me. This has resulted in a number of features that I am sure help more members of the community than my original interlocutor. Thanks again to everyone who has taken the time to share their experiences with music4dance.

The topic at hand is a recent email expressing appreciation for the ability to use the advanced search feature to find songs that can be danced to two or more different dance styles. I realize that I last blogged about this feature in 2015, before I moved the advanced search features to their own page. I missed this post in the review I went through last year to try to update some of the most out-of-date posts and archive the old ones. So I appreciate the reminder.

A little bit of personal history:

When I was first learning to dance, my teacher tried to get me up and able to social dance quickly, including several smooth dances and several rhythm dances. That was totally and completely beyond my capacity, and I spent the better part of a year taking lessons, occasionally showing up to Friday night dances and stumbling through a song or two, but not feeling very good about it. And stepping on too many toes. I clicked in with dancing when a different teacher took me on and convinced me to enter the in-studio competition with an East Coast Swing “solo” piece (what I would now call an exhibition piece – she choreographed the dance to a specific song. We put on costumes and acted out a little scene as part of the dance – pretty close to what most of the performances on Dancing With the Stars are.

With that experience, I graduated to a comfort level with East Coast Swing that I could show up to a dance and dance that one style for the one in 10ish songs that the DJ played. But wait – there is some overlap between East Coast Swing tempo and Slow Foxtrot, at least for social dancing. And the music is of a similar style, since these dances “grew up together” in the Swing Era. And even better – the people dancing Foxtrot were following line of dance around the edge of the dance floor, so we could tear up the middle of the floor with a swing and not disturb the “official” dance. Now I could be up on the floor for one in 5ish songs, and things were starting to feel better. And the rest is history.

How can music4dance help?

But back to the topic at hand. There is a strong motivation when picking songs for a social dance where many styles are represented (which is often true in a traditional ballroom setting) to cater to music that lets newbies dance what they know.  Music4dance makes this easy. If you want to find songs that fall in the overlap between East Coast Swing and Slow Foxtrot, just go to the Advanced Search page and choose each of those dances in the Dances section and click on All (you want the intersection, not the union). Or click here. Then you might want to whittle down that list to the fast end of the Slow Foxtrot and the slow end of the East Coast range – say 128 to 132 BPM, and you get a manageable list of songs to browse through. You can listen to snippets of most songs directly in music4dance. Or, if you’re a premium subscriber, you can export the list to a Spotify playlist and listen to the full songs.

There are a lot of combinations of dances this technique works for, including the dances from the title of this post – West Coast Swing and Slow Foxtrot or Cha Cha and American Rumba are just a couple. Take it for a spin and let me know what you think. And let me know if you use this alongside other features. Or just drop me a line with how you use music4dance. I always read and respond to feedback.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Create a Spotify Playlist

One of my initial goals with music4dance was to be able to create playlists to dance to.  I can finally say that I’ve got this working in a way that is close to my original vision at least for Spotify. The idea is, for instance, that I’d like to build a playlist of Foxtrot songs…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Feature: Filter by Song Length

If you’re trying to get a playlist together for a social dance, it would be nice for the songs to be a reasonable length for your audience.  I realize that DJ tools will let you manage this in multiple ways, but sometimes it’s just easier to start with songs in the length range you’d like. There are…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Add to a Spotify Playlist Directly from music4dance

A number of people have told me over the years that they create custom Spotify playlists by browsing the music4dance catalog and selecting individual songs. I’ve had ambitions to do all kinds of things to create and manipulate playlists. But it occurred to me, based on a recent conversation, that just the ability to easily…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Music and Dance

Ask music4dance: Why are the tempos that music4dance lists for Salsa wrong?

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I’ve addressed questions about tempo in several different ways over the years, and I appreciate the continued feedback, as there is absolutely room for improvement in how the music4dance system handles tempo.

Algorithms are far from perfect:

The issue at hand is that many of the tempos listed for Salsa were exactly half the speed at which one would dance. There is a straightforward explanation for this. Many of the tempos listed on the site are algorithmically generated. The algorithms are decent at this point for many types of music. But with some music (and Salsa definitely falls into this category), the algorithm “hears” a double-time or half-time beat and chooses that over the “correct” tempo for the dance.

I have several mitigations for what I think of as “shadow” tempos that I’ve implemented over the years, including a new one that was prompted by the email that also convinced me to write another post on this subject.

First, the system prefers a user-entered tempo over any algorithmically generated tempo, even if the latter is more recent (the general default for conflicting information is to believe the most recent edit). I currently don’t open up editing tempos to every user, but contact me with an example of something you’d like to change for a quick check that we’re on the same page, and I’d be happy to add that permission to your account. The more people we have catching and correcting these issues, the more reliable the site will be overall.

Second, I occasionally do a pass through the database and adjust the tempo values that are obviously outside a dance’s tempo range if halving or doubling them would put them within the dance’s range. I recently ran this process for Salsa, which significantly reduced the number of songs with the issue that prompted the original complaint. I have considered generalizing this algorithm so that if a song is added without specifying a tempo and the system generates a tempo algorithmically, it would make a simple adjustment to double or halve the tempo if that puts it within the dance’s range. But I haven’t pulled the trigger on that yet. In any case, this process still left a few songs tagged as Salsa with very unsalsa-like slow tempos. I’ll dig into that shortly.

The last feature that I hope mitigates this algorithmically generated tempo issue is brand new. People need to understand that a tempo is algorithmically generated and should therefore be taken with a grain of salt1. But there was no easy way in the music4dance user experience to indicate that the system had generated a tempo algorithmically. Now, near each algorithmically generated tempo listing is a small icon of a computer chip; clicking that icon takes you to our help page with information on how tempos are generated.

Image of the song library with algorithmic tempo icons

Different dancers can hear different beats:

But there is another, related issue. It’s not just algorithms that can “hear” a double or half-time beat. Dancers can do the same thing2. The algorithm hearing a half-time beat mentioned above is precisely the opposite problem from the one I discussed in this post, where the tempo was twice what one would dance Bolero/International Rumba to. But it was for a similar reason. Some songs have a strong enough double-time or half-time beat that it’s hard to tell which is the primary beat to count or dance to. When you are actually on the dance floor, this generally doesn’t matter, since if you’re at a salsa club and the choice is between dancing to 190BPM and 95PM, you’ll dance at 190BPM. Or conversely, if you’re in a dance studio where you’ve been studying American Rhythm, and have the same choice, you might choose to dance Bolero at 95BPM (or maybe  Mambo at 190BPM, depending on the feel of the song).

So the remaining songs in the music4dance Salsa catalog that are listed as much slower than one would dance a salsa remain because someone set that tempo based on a different dance where the slower tempo is appropriate (or because they were added with an algorithmic tempo since the last time I did a pass to clean them up). There is no easy way to solve this problem when each song has only one tempo. But I’ve been refactoring the code and the indexing service to make it easier to carry more information about the intersection between dance and song, which would allow us to list a different Salsa tempo than a Cha Cha tempo for the same song. The problem is that we would have to save a tempo field for every song/dance combination, even in the most common case where all dances to a given song are at the same tempo. I need to do some more testing to make sure that doesn’t degrade the overall search experience. The more I hear from you that this limitation is frustrating, the higher it will rise on my to-do list.

As always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Footnotes

  1. This strikes me as ironic, since I vibe-coded this feature using GitHub Copilot and Claude. And even though the underlying algorithmically generated tempo issue existed long before the current generative AI situation, it has a similar feel to me. ↩︎
  2. It’s also really fun to be able to dance a different dance than the rest of the room if you can make it work, but that may just be my rebel nature. ↩︎

What Happens When a Song is Danced at Different Tempos?

Sometimes, a song can be a perfectly good Bolero when heard one way but a Salsa when counting the music differently. Another example is Slow Dance (Castle Foxtrot) vs. Lindy Hop. Generally, this phenomenon is because, with some music, it’s easy to count what the musicians see as either a half note or a quarter…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Ask music4dance: Why is the tempo range you list for West Coast Swing wrong?

A West Coast Swing DJ contacted me and kindly let me know that the tempo range I had listed for West Coast Swing was “entirely wrong.” The average tempos that she plays are between 90 and 110 bpm, while I listed a tempo range of 112-128 bpm.  Before I dig further into the details, I’d…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
About music4dance

Add to a Spotify Playlist Directly from music4dance

Leave a comment

A number of people have told me over the years that they create custom Spotify playlists by browsing the music4dance catalog and selecting individual songs. I’ve had ambitions to do all kinds of things to create and manipulate playlists. But it occurred to me, based on a recent conversation, that just the ability to easily add a song you’ve discovered in music4dance to an existing playlist could go a long way towards smoothing out that workflow.

And I thought that would be a relatively easy feature to implement, given that I’ve already built the infrastructure to create a playlist. So I knocked out what I believe is a minimal viable implementation of that feature. It’s live and ready to go, so please give it a try. The documentation is here – but just look for the “add to playlist” button on song pages or in the play menu in search results, and hopefully it’s easy to use from there.

Like the other Spotify playlist feature, it’s a premium feature. If this is the feature that would entice you to purchase a premium subscription, but you want to take it for a test drive, let me know, and I’ll promote your account to premium for a week1.

I haven’t looked recently, but last I checked, it may be possible to do something similar with Apple Music. It would be a pretty heavy lift, though, so I’d need some assurance that a significant number of people would be willing to pay for it. Reach out if you’re interested (not necessarily to pay for it right now, but to say you’d use it in the future if I wrote it).

As always, let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Footnotes

  1. I haven’t gone to the trouble of making a trial subscription automatic, so please allow me some turnaround time to manually update your account – if I get enough requests, I’ll code it up. ↩︎

Create a Spotify Playlist

One of my initial goals with music4dance was to be able to create playlists to dance to.  I can finally say that I’ve got this working in a way that is close to my original vision at least for Spotify. The idea is, for instance, that I’d like to build a playlist of Foxtrot songs…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Feature: More Spotify Exports

One of the more active members of the music4dance.net community filed a bug report recently, noting that he tried to create a Spotify Playlist, but it came up empty. The playlist was All West Coast Swing (with at least 3 votes) songs having tempo between 100 and 120 beats per minute including songs edited by…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Feature: Searching for a song from Spotify or iTunes

A new member of the music4dance community, Arne, pointed out that he expected to be able to search by Spotify Id. Furthermore, he figured out how to do that by going to the Add Song by Id and dragging the song from Spotify into the edit field on that page. This is a case of programmer myopia on…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2025

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Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 2134 songs cataloged, up from 1759 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of this feature in the twenty-seventeen! Thanks again to everyone who has contributed by adding songs and tagging songs with dances.

Last year, I asked for ideas about how to improve the catalog and listed a few thoughts of my own. I didn’t get any feedback, but I did implement one of my own thoughts as part of a larger project. The main holiday music page now shows songs with the largest aggregate number of dance votes first. I’ll refresh my call for thoughts on improving the catalog itself, but I won’t add any more of my own ideas. Please let me know if you have any thoughts. Even a quick email or comment on this post about how you use the catalog could be the source of the next feature.

That said, this year I’d like to focus a little more on building the catalog. On top of the normal methods of ingesting playlists that I find and the community adding and voting on holiday songs, I’d like to put out a call to band leaders,  producers (and any other role) who record music for partner dancing of any kind. Glenn Crytzer and I worked together to get his full catalog indexed on the site, and I also pulled in his list of holiday songs so they’re tagged appropriately. If you would like to work with me to index your music on the site, I’d be delighted to do that. I’m specifically calling for holiday albums today. Nevertheless, I’m happy to work with complete catalogs, even if they don’t include holiday music (I might prioritize that work a little lower for the next few weeks).

As always, let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Happy Holidays, everyone. May your holiday dances be the best yet!

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2024

Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 1759 songs cataloged, up from 1536 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of…

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msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Please help us catalog new music

A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances…

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msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing

It is that time of year when dancers are looking for holiday music for dancing.  That seems like a pretty good thing to be able to search for on the music4dance site.  So I thought I’d give it try.  The easy thing to do would be to just type Holiday into the search bar in…

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msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
About music4dance

music4dance Goes Country (part I)

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One of the most common requests I’ve received is to support Country Western dances. That request has come in many forms, but I don’t have personal experience with Country Western dancing (well, that’s not 100% true, I learned to West Coast Swing at a Country bar in downtown Seattle that my ballroom dancer friends would hang out at after rehearsing). I’m nearly certain that in adapting music4dance to support more country music, I’ll stick my foot in something stinky and get some negative feedback. I’m all right with that – all feedback will make the site better in the long run, just please try to be gentle 🙂 I’ve also stepped on plenty of toes with Ballroom dance which I know quite a bit about, Argentine Tango, which I know a little about and some of the social dances that fall in between on my personal knowledge spectrum.

And music4dance is pretty complicated to begin with, so adding another dimension may make it harder to use. But I’m hoping that, with your help and some iteration on the idea, we can get things to work even better in the long run.

My initial approach to adding Country Western Dance support is to review the organizations that publish competition rules, including tempo information, and see if I can work those dances into the music4dance system in a way similar to how I’ve set up the competition ballroom dances. This turned out to be easier than I expected. All three organizations that I found online (United Country Western Dance Council, World Country Dance Federation, and American Country Dance Association) list eight competition dances. Triple Two, Polka, Night Club Two Step, Cha Cha, Waltz, Two Step, Swing, and West Coast Swing. Only one of those dances wasn’t already in the database (Triple Two). Polka and Country Two Step were random additions early in the site’s evolution because a couple of DJ friends and lists published by ballroom dance studios included enough songs of those styles to make it worth my while to include them.

My biggest question was, should I create new dances for all of the dances that overlapped? After all, the Cha Cha danced in Country Western competitions is certainly not the Cha Cha I learned competing in American Rhythm (heck, the cha cha that the International Latin dancers were learning in the next room wasn’t the same dance either). I decided to follow the pattern that I’ve already established for Ballroom dances with the same name, even if they are pretty different. Rumba is probably the strongest example in the ballroom catalog of two dances with the same name that are not the same dance. But the characteristics of the music that a dancer cares most about are similar – this is true even of Rumba, where the tempo is significantly different.

Not coincidentally, I recently finished a significant project that allowed me to use the core database to easily and accurately search specifically for American Rumba vs. International Rumba. While there are a few drawbacks to grouping America, International, and Country Cha Cha together, there are a lot of advantages both in terms of how the system works internally and in making it easier to find new music for everyone (I’ve always been a proponent of genre-bending in fiction and cross-over choreography in dance).

So, there is now an active “Country Western Competition Dancing” page, and all of the individual dance pages for dances that include Country styles include the competition info for those dances. I’ll continue to tweak some of this information as I get feedback and do more research.

I realized as I was writing this post that I hadn’t addressed the fact that this change also complicated the voting mechanism. I want to encourage folks to vote on a song being a good Cha Cha, but also make it easy for them to specify Country, International, or American. I made some quick tweaks, but this is definitely a feature still under development.

Please let me know what you think (even – possibly especially – if you think I got it completely wrong). I’m interested in whether there are other Country Western dances that I should include, even if they’re not part of the core competition dances. There was a reference to Country Smooth and Country Rhythm rounds in one of the organizations rules, should I be supporting that? I’ve also used the composite tempos from the rules, combining the different levels to give the broadest range. Should I just be using the most advanced category?  What else have I missed?

And as always, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

Songs for Halloween Ballroom and Partner Dances – 2025 edition

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We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween song catalog. As of this writing, there are 1151 songs tagged as Halloween with a positive number of dance votes.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, we’ve gone from using the general tagging mechanism where you could search on songs that had a musical genre of “Halloween” and a particular dance, to having a dedicated Halloween Songs page. Other than pulling some new lists of Halloween songs, there isn’t a lot new to highlight in this post. But I think it’s always worthy of a reminder when a dance-worthy holiday is approaching. I also don’t have a great way other than these posts to track the number of songs in these kinds of queries year over year (although that’s technically possible – probably not the most productive use of my coding time). Hopefully, the state of the Halloween and Holiday catalogs is mature enough to be generally helpful.

While I’ve got you, though, here are a few questions. Please feel free to reach out via the comment on this post or any of the other feedback mechanisms with your answers. I read all responses and respond to everything that I can.

First, the obvious: is there anything about searching for Halloween music that you would like to see improved? Most of the new features over the last few years have come out of conversations with members of the community. And on a tangentially related note, are there other holidays or more complex queries that you’d like to see represented on the site?

Next, if you have Halloween playlists you’re willing to share, please do. I can reasonably easily pull in lists of various formats. My main requirement is that the songs be well-defined (title, artist, album, if possible) and that they be associated with a form of partner dance. Or take a run at adding a few of your favorite songs or voting on your favorite dance styles for songs that are already in the catalog. If you’re up for a bit more of a project, I’m still offering free premium memberships for folks who have the knowledge and are willing to vote on the danceability of songs, especially those that don’t have any votes at all. There are about 500 Halloween songs currently in the catalog that don’t have any dance votes. 

Finally, as always, please let me know if you have any thoughts about the subject of this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

About music4dance

Please help us catalog new music

A Swing Band leader (Glenn Crytzer) reached out to me recently, asking if it would be possible to add his entire catalog to the music4dance.net database. He found a few of his songs already listed, but has a published catalog of well over a hundred songs, most of which should be danceable to partner dances…

Keep reading
Special Occasions

Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

Halloween is fast approaching, and I’m updating the music4dance Halloween catalog to include more partner dance Halloween music. I’ve pulled some generic Halloween playlists and cross-referenced them with the existing music4dance catalog. Using this method and some help from the community, we now have 340 songs available in the Halloween catalog that are also tagged…

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Special Occasions

Are you ready for your Halloween Dance?

Whether you’re a DJ getting your playlist together or a performer looking for that perfect song to craft a routine to, our Halloween collection is a great place to start. I’ve recently spent some time expanding the catalog. As of this writing, there are 222 songs tagged as Halloween with at least one vote for…

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Special Occasions

Are you looking for Halloween Music to dance to?

Halloween is almost here and yet again I am late setting up something for Halloween related playlists.  In past years, I’ve just let this go since it feels like it’s too late to get something together when I start thinking about it in mid-October.  But this year I decided to just do it. After all,…

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