Category Archives: Special Occasions

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

Special Occasions

Ballroom Christmas Music (2023)

Leave a comment

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?

Leave a comment

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)

1 Comment

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

Leave a comment

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.

Special Occasions

Valentine’s Day Edition: Love Songs that We Love to Dance to

Leave a comment

I’ve been making an effort to tag songs and write sophisticated searches to find good songs for holiday dances. The music4dance catalog is set up for this kind of search. Not only that, but I’ve always really enjoyed doing exhibition pieces for holiday parties.

I started with the Christmas/Winter holidays and added Halloween more recently. I hadn’t really thought about Valentine’s Day. But when I did (a little late for this year, but never too early to be planning for next year), I realized that I already had something pretty useful: What better place to look for love songs than a wedding music catalog. Which, coincidently, I’ve spent some time building up.

So if you’re looking for love songs to dance to, check out the Wedding Dance page and let me know what you think. This time of year, there are plenty of generic lists of Love Songs, so if I get some feedback that you’d like a more general list of danceable love songs, I can do some cross-indexing with one or more of those lists. And of course, you can always start adding songs and/or tagging existing songs with a “Love Song” tag and create your own lists.

As always, I’m very interested in your feedback, so please share any thoughts and ideas you have 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 that makes sense for you.

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2021

Leave a comment

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

This year, 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.  But I have continued to add songs.  As of this writing, there are 667 songs in the holiday catalog, up from 517 songs last year. And, yes, there were 666 songs before I started writing this post – it seemed inappropriate to have that number of the holiday catalog so I dug up one more song to get to 667.

Check out the current Holiday Music Catalog here.

If you are interested in helping build the catalog further, 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.

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2020

Leave a comment

On a normal year, this would be a bit late for my normal Holiday Music blog post.  But if you’re like me, you’re not planning to participate in a holiday dance party in the middle of a pandemic.  So it’s more of a case of thinking about past and future years.  There is no need to find a specific song for a routine or build a set list for a dance. But I would still like to listen to holiday music at home and maybe play with a few dance moves.

In any case, I’m continually working to improve the music4dance experience and this time of year concentrating a bit on holiday themes seems appropriate.  The main thing I’ve done with the holiday music pages is to update them to the new system.  Hopefully they are easier to read and work with in general.  I’ve also explicitly excluded “Halloween” music, since one tends to want to separate out that from the Christmas and other winter holiday music.  I’ve also updated the music4dance playlists on Spotify to reflect the larger catalog.

As of this writing there are 517 songs in the holiday catalog, up from 446 songs last year. If you are interested in helping build the catalog further, 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.

Special Occasions

Are you looking for Halloween Music to dance to?

Leave a comment

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, we may be thinking about what we’re going to do for next Halloween, in which case we’ve got plenty of time to plan.

A few years ago I set up a holiday music page to do my best to collect the songs that are tagged in different ways but that all generally mean they might be useful to use in a holiday playlist or be fun to choreograph a dance to for a holiday party.  But this was specifically aimed at the Christmas/Winter holiday tradition.  And it was made more difficult because I was gathering together a whole bunch of different tags.

For Halloween things are much easier.  All I needed to do was pull in some Halloween playlists and match them with the existing music4dance catalog.  I’ve got a good start on this, which you can see here.  If you want to navigate to this yourself, just go to the tag cloud page (available from the music menu) and click on the “Halloween” tag. Then choose “List all songs tagged as Halloween.”  If you want to filter by dance style, you can click on advanced search and choose the style.

As of this writing, I’ve got about 80 songs cataloged as Halloween that are also cross referenced by dance.  If you have lists of danceable Halloween music, I’d be happy to include them on the site.  For this or any other questions or suggestions, feel free to reply to this post or send feedback.  You can also tag songs yourself.

As always, thank you for supporting music4dance.

Quick Tip:

When you have a list of songs (such as the Halloween list) you can refine the list by clicking on the advanced search link or by clicking on any of the dances or tags listed on the page.

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2019

Leave a comment

And yet again, it’s that time of year when dancers and DJs are looking for holiday music for routines and holiday dance parties.  In my third annual installment of holiday music posts I’d like to cover some of the new things that I’ve implemented on the music4dance website that make finding holiday music to dance to easier.  For a broader view of holiday music on music for dance please take a quick look at my 2017 and 2018 holiday music blog posts.

As before, the Holiday Dance Music page reveals a list of holiday songs that you can peruse and discover what dances others have danced to them as well as checking out the songs that are filtered by any particular dance style by clicking the dance links at the bottom of the page.

New for 2019, on the individual holiday dance pages you’ll see a Spotify player that will let you play the songs on that page directly from the page or click on the Spotify logo on the player to open up the playlist in your player.  You can also go to the music4dance profile directly in Spotify and browse our holiday playlists.  While you’re their, please take a moment to follow both the music4dance profile and the playlist.

For premium members, you can use the Bonus Content feature to find even more song ideas that I wasn’t able to match to the Spotify, Amazon or Apple Music catalog, but that someone at some time dug up and danced to at a holiday dance.

Also for premium members, you can now create your own playlists based on searches that include holiday related tags.  For instance, I created a playlist of all songs tagged Christmas Pop that had an associated dance by just creating a search for all Christmas Pop and exporting to Spotify.

I am going to continue to attempt to build the holiday catalog.  I’ve made some progress, moving from 261 songs last year to 446 songs as of this writing.  If you are interested in helping, here are some things you could do:

  • Sign up for our add song beta and add holiday songs yourself.
  • 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.