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 the song library.  Which certainly shows a bunch of holiday music.  But some of the top results are songs by Billy Holiday or songs with Holiday in the title like “Holiday” by Madonna or “Holiday” by Green Day.  All great songs, and even great songs to dance to, but not really what we think of as songs for the holiday season.

So then I went to the tags page and looked for Holiday.   This was a little better, I can click on the musical genre Holiday tag and get a list of nearly two hundred holiday songs.  But then there are over a hundred songs tagged with the other Holiday tag.  There is a bunch of overlap between these two lists, but not 100%.  Then there are the 30ish songs that are tagged as Christmas music which also overlap with the other lists, but not 100%.  This is one of the wonderful but somewhat chaotic aspects of crowdsourcing content – everyone has a bit different way of looking at things.

Since none of the above were quite right, I created a Holiday Music page that pulls together all of the music tagged with any of the tags above into a single list, which is really what I want when looking for holiday music to dance to.  Take a look and see if it helps you as well.  As always, feel free to tag any of the songs in the catalog however you like, including adding a Holiday tag to any songs that are missing it (your choice as to whether you make that a Musical Genre tag or an Other tag).  Also if you have any lists of holiday songs cataloged by dance style that you would like to share, please send them to me and I’d be happy to load them up.  Finally, if you are interested in adding your own songs to the music4dance catalog please contact me, I am looking for beta testers for the add song functionality.

P.S. I intended to get this up earlier but ran into a bit of a snag when the site went down for almost a day last weekend.  If you’re technical and have any interest in what happened I wrote a description of the event on my technical blog.