Category Archives: Special Occasions

Searching for music related to special occasions (Holidays, Weddings, etc.)

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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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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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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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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Special Occasions

Ballroom Songs for Your First Dance

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Wedding season is upon us again, so I thought I’d take another run at filling out the music4dance.net wedding dance catalog with wedding spotlight songs cross-referenced by partner/ballroom dance style. It’s pretty common to choreograph a first dance, and I’ve seen mothers and fathers learn a particular style of dance so they could lead/follow their offspring in a partner dance, especially among friends who are part of a social dance or ballroom community.

Cross-referencing between a tag and a dance style is something that the music4dance database is set up to handle exceptionally well. But, of course, someone has to add the tags and vote on the dances. I recently did a round of collecting information from Spotify playlists, but that is never as good as community members contributing their ideas. Please consider adding your own first dance or other wedding spotlight songs to the database.

On that note, I’m seeing more and more different wedding spotlight dances (for lack of a better term). I mentioned Mother/Daughter the last time I looked at wedding dances, but now I’m also seeing Father/Son, Brother/Sister, and Last Dance, just to name a few. This pattern has me thinking about the most helpful format for the wedding dance page. I like the simple table format because I can get a quick idea of the distribution of different dance styles of songs in the database compared to the spotlight event, but that probably isn’t the best way to look at the data from the perspective of someone looking for a song to dance to and gets worse if I add more columns.  I’m leaning towards another generalization of the Holiday page. The top-level page would be linked to each of the spotlight dances (First Dance, Mother/Son, etc.), and then each of those pages would look like the holiday page with a list of all songs that suit the event and links to drill down to a particular style of dance.

I don’t think I should be adding wedding songs like processionals, recessionals, etc., because I’m pretty sure people don’t dance partner dances to those. But as I type this, I can’t shake the thought of a father and daughter Viennese Waltzing down the aisle to Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway.” I’m also not ready to tackle the line dances that are often done during the reception, as there are sites that specialize in line dances, and from what I can tell, the set of these dances that are used at wedding receptions is small enough that it doesn’t require a database to keep track of them.

But are there other spotlight dances that we should be tagging? Can you think of different ways to organize the catalog? If you have ideas about this post or the site, comment below or use 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.

P.S. Since I don’t have a great way of tracking historical song counts, I will note here that as of this writing, there are 1771 songs tagged as Wedding and have at least one dance vote, of which 1131 are tagged as First Dance.

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part I: We already chose our song)

Wedding season is upon us, and one of the things that come with weddings is receptions with first dances, father/daughter dances, mother/son dances, mother/daughter dances, and any other variation you can think of. I think it’s extra special when those dances are recognizably partner dances like Foxtrot, Rumba, or Swing. Of course, I have a bit of a bias. If you want to find…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2024

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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 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 this feature in the twenty-seventeen! Thanks again to everyone who has contributed by adding songs and tagging songs with dances.

Most years, I’ve tried to do small things to improve the browsing experience for holiday songs. This year, I’ve been in the code, generalizing it to support Broadway lists. But I haven’t done anything to improve the core Holiday Music experience. This phenomenon may be a sign that the feature is mature enough that it doesn’t need additional improvement. But more likely, it’s a sign that I’ve run low on ideas. I’d like to know if there are any improvements that you would like to see in the holiday music browsing experience.

Here are a few ideas to get you started; none of them are clicking enough form to implement without some encouragement from you:

  • Add the ability to sort by most recently added rather than just by dance rating.
  • Add the ability to sort the main holiday list by aggregate dance rating. If I do this, it would likely be part of a larger project to enable more emphasis on sorting and filtering by dance rating.
  • Add the ability to ingest albums that were specifically designed for ballroom dancers, such as DanceLife’s Christmas Best, where the song name encodes the dance name and tempo. Many songs from these types of albums have already been added to the music4dance catalog, but I’d be able to pull in a bunch more if I automated the process.
  • Add the ability to gather statistics on how many songs were in the catalog at a particular date – right now, the only history I have on how big the holiday catalog is these blog entries. The raw data exists to get those answers, but it would require a significant lift. I am curious about this, but not enough to do anything about it unless someone could suggest a more general use for the ability.

I am sure there are many other ideas I haven’t come to that would improve the holiday music browsing experience. Please let me know what would help you the most, and I’ll see what I can do.

In addition to the specific ask above, I’m always happy to hear ideas about 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.

Special Occasions

Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

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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 with at least one dance style.

One of the side effects of pulling in generic playlists is that many songs in the database are tagged as Halloween but don’t have any associated dances. These songs are hidden by default since they don’t do a lot of good for someone searching for music to dance to. But premium members can see them and other songs that I haven’t been able to match to online music catalogs, which lets those folks dig into some of the data that might have hidden gems.

I’ve been going through these songs and adding dance tags where they make sense to me, but I could use some help. If you’re interested in pitching in and aren’t already a premium member, I’d happily give you a month’s premium subscription in return for your help. If you are already a premium member, I’d extend your membership for a month if you tag some Halloween songs with dances. Let me know if you’re interested in the offer.

Even if you’re not up for helping with Halloween song cataloging, please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

Ballroom Christmas Music (2023)

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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 partner dance to.  I haven’t made any major changes to the Holiday Dance Pages this year, but there is plenty of new music to browse.  Last year, we were at 667 songs, and I was hoping to break 1000 for this year.  Which we did.  As of this writing, music4dance has 1536 songs cataloged that are tagged as both Holiday and have some kind of partner dance associated with them.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this effort!

Hear the Beat, Feel the Music: James Joseph

This Holiday season, I am trying something new.  I’ve partnered with James Joseph to offer a special holiday promotion.  From now until the end of the year, if you support music4dance by subscribing at the Bronze ($25) level or donating $25, you’ll receive an electronic copy of Jim’s book Hear the Beat, Feal the Music .  This is a great resource for dancers working on improving their musicality (see my full review here), and I’m grateful to Jim for providing this opportunity for the music4dance community.

Click here to subscribe or donate.

If you aren’t in a position to provide financial support for this project, there are plenty of other ways to contribute.  Specifically, to help build the Holiday Music catalog, you can:

  • Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
  • Add new music through the Add Song form.
  • If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please email me at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.

As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog mentioned above or any other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.

Special Occasions

Are you ready for your Halloween Dance?

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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 some kind of partner dance like Foxtrot, Cha-Cha, or Salsa.

Several years ago, I made an initial pass at taking generic Halloween playlists and cross-referencing them with the music4dance catalog of songs tagged by dance style. At the time, I did the simplest possible thing: I imported the songs from some Halloween catalogs and then put a link in the songs menu that went to that query. At the time, 80 songs were tagged as Halloween and associated with a dance.

This seemed fine at the time, but recently, I noticed folks searching on the keyword “Halloween.” What does that get someone beyond the songs I had explicitly imported a while ago? One of the side-effects of the system is that I link as many albums that a song has been released on as I can. This means that if a song lands on “Halloween Hits” or something like it, searching by the Halloween keyword will find it even though no one in the music4dance universe tagged it as such.

So, over the last few days, I spent some time reviewing that list and adding an explicit “Halloween” tag where I felt it was appropriate. For the most part, if the song was included on a Halloween Party album, I included it. But I didn’t include songs that were merely on an album because they were used in a horror movie. Some songs will still appear in a search for Halloween that aren’t in the explicit Halloween catalog. If you find one that would make sense to include in a Halloween dance, please tag it.

As I mentioned earlier, between the general evolution of the music4dance catalog and my current efforts, there are, as of this writing, 222 songs that are tagged as Halloween and also have at least one dance vote.

That starts to get interesting and motivated me to generalize the code I wrote a while back for Christmas/Winter holiday music to create a dedicated Halloween page. That’s where you’ll land if you choose Music -> Halloween from the main menu. And that gives an easy route to finding all the Halloween songs to dance a Single Swing to (for instance). You could have done that with the old system, but folks don’t always find the advanced search; this makes things a little easier. In addition, this gave me a smooth path to exporting the results to Spotify. Now, each Halloween Dance page has a Spotify widget with the playlist, and you can go to the music4dance Spotify account and browse the Halloween Playlists. While you’re there, please like the playlist and the music4dance account, which helps spread the word.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part II: We already chose our dance)

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Last time I wrote about how music4dance can help you find a dance to match the song you’d like to dance to for your first dance (or other wedding dances). This time, I’ll cover how the site can help you find a song if you already know what dance style you want to dance. Before I dig into that, I’d like to repeat that your local dance studio and your wedding DJ are both excellent sources of ideas.

Since I first wrote about this idea early a decade ago, I’ve made some improvements to the site. The easiest way to find wedding songs that match your dance is to go to the wedding music page (Music -> Wedding on the main menu). There you’ll find a table of dance styles and types of wedding dance. The cells in that table have a number that represents the number of songs we have cataloged for that dance style and also tagged with the type of wedding dance. Click on the number to get to a list of songs where you can play samples and find the full version of the song on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon.

The wedding music page is just a shortcut to using the advanced search tool. If you want to search for something unavailable in the wedding dance table, you can do the same type of search using the tool. For instance, I haven’t added Mother/Daughter songs to the table as of this writing. But a few people have tagged songs as Mother/Daughter. So you could go to the advanced search tool, include the tag “Mother Daughter,” optionally choose a dance, and see what comes up.

In addition, when you do an advanced search, you can find the search again on your search page. And if you’re a premium subscriber, you can export results as a Spotify playlist to listen through the songs at your convenience.

I hope this helped. And if you’ve got suggestions for other wedding-related tags, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog with whatever tags make sense to you – they’ll be helpful to someone else in the future.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

We’d like to dance a “real” partner dance as the first dance at our wedding (Part I: We already chose our song)

3 Comments

Wedding season is upon us, and one of the things that come with weddings is receptions with first dances, father/daughter dances, mother/son dances, mother/daughter dances, and any other variation you can think of. I think it’s extra special when those dances are recognizably partner dances like Foxtrot, Rumba, or Swing. Of course, I have a bit of a bias.

If you want to find a dance that fits the song you love, here are some things that can help. In my next post, I’ll cover the other direction – finding a song to fit your dance.

First, consider visiting your local dance studio and asking a professional. The other professional that could help is your wedding DJ; sometimes, they are also dance teachers or at least know a dance teacher to connect you with.

In tandem with going to a professional, some features of music4dance.net can help. The first is to try searching for your song – you can type the title into the search box in the menu bar or on the Song Library page. If it’s a particularly popular song, you might also include the artist to see if you can get to the specific version of the song. But oftentimes, variations on a song by different artists still maintain enough of the same characteristics to be danced to the same dance. So be creative in your search and see what you come up with.

For example, try typing “Fly me to the moon” into the search bar – including the quotes to get songs with that full title rather than all the songs with those keywords. And we’re probably most interested in the Frank Sinatra version, so scroll down to that or add Sinatra (outside of the quotes) to the search.

You can already see which dances folks in the music4dance community have voted on to dance to this song. There is quite a spectrum. If you click on the song title, you will get more details. Among other things that will show you that Slow Foxtrot is the most-voted dance for this song, some folks have voted for East Coast Swing and Jive but have noted that it’s slow for those dances. That’s not necessarily bad; you could speed up the song a bit (modern technology is fantastic) and get it to something still slow for ECS but not crazy slow – which might be just the right tempo for a first dance.

But what if you can’t find the song in the music4dance catalog? There is another tool that can provide some help. Try looking at the tempo counter tool (and its help page). Counting out the song’s tempo in this tool will show you which dances can technically be danced to the song. The tempo counter result doesn’t tell you anything about if the style of the song fits the dance. But this is also pretty interesting because if you’re going to go all the way and choreograph a first dance, sometimes doing something that’s a little out of a stylistic mismatch can be pretty effective. Choreographing a dance to a song that doesn’t quite fit is frequently done with showcase dances like those you see on Dancing with the Stars and can be very effective in creating a memorable wedding dance.

I hope this helped and that you really enjoy your first dance, not to mention the rest of your wedding and reception.

If you used the second method I mentioned or the help of a professional to find a song/dance combination for any of your wedding dances, please consider becoming part of the music4dance community and adding your wedding songs to the catalog.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. In addition, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.

P.S. This is a reboot of a very early blog post I wrote in 2015. Since the site has been through a couple of significant over-hauls since I wrote the first pair of wedding music posts, I think it’s worthwhile revisiting them. I may end up doing a more systematic rewrite. In that case, I’ll try to figure out a better way to index the posts to remove duplicates and/or make the fresher content pop up ahead of the old content.

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2022

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It’s the time of year again to talk about Holiday Music.

For the second year in a row, I haven’t done any new work on the Holiday Music page other than keeping it up to date with the rest of the site (which sometimes isn’t a small task).  But I have continued to add songs.  As of this writing, there are 953 songs in the holiday catalog, up from 667 songs last year.

Check out the current Holiday Music Catalog here.

If you are interested in helping build the catalog further (maybe we can get to 1000), here are some things you could do:

  • Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
  • If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please send me an email at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.
  • In addition, general contributions will help the holiday music catalog and other efforts.

As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog as mentioned above or any of the other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.