Category Archives: Special Occasions

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

Special Occasions

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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.

Special Occasions

Dance Pride

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Each year Spotify does a number of fun playlists in support of Pride weekend.  With this being the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, they pulled out all the stops. 

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap between these playlists and songs that are great for partner dancing.  And I’m not just talking about disco music.  I’ve been listening to several of these playlists including Pride Classics and Disco Fever.  The surprise is that it wasn’t until the end of Pride month that it occurred to me that it would be fun and possibly useful to cross reference some of the Pride playlists with the music4dance catalog.

But better late than never.  Click here to see the full list.  You can get to the pride catalog anytime by going to the “Music” menu, choosing the “Tags” option and then finding the “Pride” button.  Clicking on that will pop up a menu that will let you list all the songs tagged as “Pride.”  I’ve also added tags for the specific playlists that Spotify built, so you can use the same method to get to the Disco Fever, Pride Classics or Fierce playlists.

Remember, there is a lot of subjectivity to what someone finds to be a danceable song.  So please sign in and express your opinion by voting on that for your favorite songs and dances. 

If you’re a premium member you can see the full Spotify lists, even the ones that we didn’t already have cross-referenced, by clicking the “Change Search” button on the results and then choosing “Not categorized by dance” and then “Search.”  Then you could go and add what you would dance to any of the songs that are uncategorized.

As always, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing (Take 2)

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It’s that time of year again – people are searching for holiday music for showcases and holiday party dances.   So I decided to take another round at what I could do to improve that experience on the music4dance website.  Take a quick look at my post from last year since that is still 100% applicable.  Don’t worry, I’ll wait…

You’re back?  Great!  As you can see, I took some pretty big shortcuts to get the Holiday Music page up before Christmas last year.  This year I spent a little while to improve the page.

First, I made the pages work like the other song search pages so that you get 25 songs at a time and can scale up to much longer searches.  There are only 261 songs on the main Holiday Music page as of this writing, but I hope to get that number up to the point where loading them all on one page is prohibitive.

Second, I added the functionality to list all of the Holiday Music for an individual dance style.  So if you are choreographing a routine for Quickstep or Rumba, you can now list just the Holiday Quickstep or the Holiday Rumba songs.

Over the course of this holiday season, I hope to add more music.  If you are interested in helping, here are a couple of things you can try:

  • 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 us an email at info@music4dance.net or contact us through our feedback form.

I’ll also get things set up to push these lists out to Spotify soon.

As always if you have comments or suggestions please feel free to reply to this post or contact me here.

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing

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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 musical genre tag Holiday tag and get a list of nearly two hundred holiday songs.  But then there are over a hundred songs tagged with the other other tagHoliday tag.  There is a bunch of overlap between these two lists, but not 100%.  Then there are the 30ish songs that are tagged as musical genre tagChristmas 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. (Update 2024: The technical blog referenced here never took off, so I’ve taken it down. But I have a new medium blog with other topics, some related to how I built this site, so please check that out).