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.
music4dance, as the name implies, is all about the relationship between music and dance. And naturally, on the website and the blog, I tend to concentrate on the musical aspect of dance. In addition, I tend to focus in on the kind of partner dances that I’m most familiar with.
But every once in a while it’s nice to step back and remember that dance is visually beautiful. And witnessing the joy of people dancing is one of the things that make life worth living. Misty Copeland’s recent New York Times piece “Past Tense: Perpetual Motion, A Journey Through Dance Photography” is a striking example of the range of dance and the beauty and expression of dance. And of course her commentary enhances the experience.
If you like that piece, the coffee table style book A Century of Dance has many more wonderful dance images along with some great historical tidbits.
And finally, please remember that if you find books or music through this site that you would like to purchase, clicking on the links and purchasing during that session on Amazon or Apple Music will help support the site.
Software bugs are miserable things in any context. But when you have a small project like music4dance where there are so many external dependencies, bugs can creep in even when nothing has changed in the project. Add that to all of the normal avenues of bug creation and things can turn into a mess very rapidly. I have to balance very limited amount of time on music4dance between creating content (like this blog post), curating content on the site, adding new features, testing and fixing bugs. Not to mention adding automated testing and production logging.
Needless to say,
this gets very complicated very fast and things slip through the cracks. And then you end up with anywhere between a
slightly annoying to a completely unusable experience. This obviously not good for anybody and
frustrating for all.
But there are
thousands of you out there that visit music4dance regularly. So if you report bugs as you see them,
hopefully we can nip them in the bud and make the experience better for
everyone. I can’t promise to fix every
bug that comes through but I’ll do my best to keep up so that everyone’s
experience is improved.
And to sweeten the pot I’d like to offer a bug bounty for each unique bug reported. Check out our Bug Report page for details.
As always, I’m interested in feedback beyond bug reports so feel free to respond to this post or use our feedback page.
Microsoft has moved
to a new sign-in protocol and our current system for signing in with a
Microsoft account started failing. I
looked into switching over to the new protocol and it seems like a few hours of
work. But given that I only have a few
hours a week to devote to music4dance that’s really a week’s worth of
work. Since I have very few customers
that use this login method and the main reason for supporting this method was
for Xbox
Music AKA Groove Music integration which has already been deprecated, I’ve
notified those individuals with a work-around and am turning off this feature.
If you believe that this is an indispensable feature, please provide feedback and I’ll consider re-implementing it. If you have issues logging in with any other method please file a bug and I will do my best to address it.
One of the ways that
I like to search for music is by era. At
least as far as twentieth century American music goes, this tends to be
categorized by decade.
Early on, I tried
some experiments around pulling publication date for a song to help with this
kind of search. But the sources I had
generally listed release date as whatever the most recent release of the song
was, which was often on a compilation album and had nothing to do with when the
song was first published. Even more
importantly, when we think of music associated with a particular decade it’s a
very loose definition and involves a judgement call about style as much as any
technicality around original the release date.
But since I’ve been grabbing information from a bunch of different places and a few of them have been tagging music by decade, I’ve got a decent catalog of songs that have decade tags. You can take a look by going to the tags page and clicking on any of the decades like the 1970s or 2000s.
If you’re interested in finding songs for a particular dance style from a specific decade, that’s exactly what the Advanced Search functionality is for. You can go to the form, choose Rumba from the “dance style” chooser and go to the “Other” tags under “Include Tags” (the brown pencil). Choose 1980s from the list of tags and click include. Then click search, and you will get a list of songs from the 80’s that you should be able to dance a Rumba to. If you’ve got particular tempo needs, for instance, if you’re looking for a slower or faster Rumba, you can always restrict the tempo in the advanced search form as well. If you don’t have a good handle on dance tempi for dances, check out our tempi tool.
Speaking of searching for specific tempos. One of the features that we’ve recently added is the ability to find songs by tempo even if we haven’t identified a specific partner dance for the song. As of this writing, we are trying this out as a premium feature. If you have purchased a premium subscription, you can check the box on the Advanced Search page to include the “Not categorized by dance” bonus content, specify your tempo range and get a larger list of songs that meet those criteria. (Check out more details on my bonus content blog post.) This should be useful for people that are looking for music of a specific tempo for dances that we haven’t categorized yet or for exercise that isn’t dancing.
As always, I’m interested in your feedback. Let me know how you use this feature, or what would make it better.
As of this writing
the publicly visible music4dance
catalog contains just over twenty seven thousand songs. But the underlying index contains well over
forty six thousand songs. So what’s the
deal with the missing twenty thousand songs?
These are song listings that I’ve pulled in one way or another but
aren’t complete in some way.
All of the songs must have been matched to an entry in one of the publisher catalogs that we search.
I believe that these
are perfectly reasonable constraints and help to reduce confusion for a novice
user. However, there is a whole lot of information indexed in our catalog that
people aren’t seeing and could be of some use.
One of the things that people often do on the site is to search for ideas for songs to dance to. They will search for an artist name or a fragment of the title of a song and see what comes up. This works great, but of course, the more songs that can be searched the more likely that you’ll get a useful idea. The songs that are in the bonus section have had less scrutiny, many of them probably have small typos or other inaccuracies in the title or artist that prevented them from being matched to a publisher’s catalog. Or they might be obscure songs that just aren’t as easily available on Spotify or Amazon. In either case, I think getting to these additional songs is useful to the expert user sleuthing for the interesting or obscure song to choreograph to or surprise their dancers with.
Another case is
where someone is looking for a song of a particular tempo but doesn’t
necessarily need it to be specifically for one of the dance styles that we
currently catalog. This might be because
they’re looking for something to dance to in a different style that might have
a specific tempo requirement but doesn’t
necessarily have some of the other requirements for partner dancing. One case that comes to mind is tap dance
music, but I’m sure there are others.
One could potentially use this for finding running or exercise music of
a specific tempo.
If you’re interested
in exploring this, here’s how:
As always, I’m interested in your feedback. Please let me know if this feature seems useful to you. Or even better, let me know how you use this feature so that I can add that to common use cases and blog about it in the future.
This year, I would
like to generate enough revenue to pay for the site’s maintenance costs. This isn’t a whole lot, but it’s
significantly more than current advertising and referral revenue streams
represent. I can see two paths to making
that happen. One is to increase the
number of active users of the site significantly and the other is to create a
more direct revenue stream.
As someone who uses this site, I’m asking for your help in one or both of these efforts.
To increase the number of people visiting the site (and therefore increasing advertising and referral revenue) all you have to do is tell your dancing friends. And if you run a web site or blog, please link to music4dance. I’m happy to link back to appropriate content as well, so if you run a website that makes sense for cross-promotion, please contact me.
In order to create direct revenue streams, I’ve built a premium subscription and a way to donate to the site. For now, the annual subscription is ten dollars a year and gives you an advertising-free experience. You can also donate any amount, either on top of the subscription fee or without purchasing a subscription. More information on this is available on our “contribute” page.
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.
One of the coolest things about the music4dance website was the ability to use the embedded Spotify player to play the results of a search. For instance, I could go to the site and list all the songs that are listed as Slow Foxtrot and also tagged as genre rock and order them from slow to fast like this. Then I’d be able to play the songs in the embedded Spotify player.
Unfortunately, Spotify turned off the feature that allowed me to do this and I’ve been wracking my brain and searching the web for viable alternatives. You can still go to the play buttons for individual songs and play a 30-second sample, most songs in the catalog have a sample available thanks to either Apple or Spotify. This works pretty well if you’re using the site to find an idea for a song for a routine, which is pretty common. You can also use the Amazon button to click through to the Amazon site and play a sample there.
As an aside, if you buy the song from Amazon through a link from the site a small percentage of the purchase price goes to support the music4dance site. So, by all means, please do this whenever you find music that you want to purchase via the site. Another interesting aspect of Amazon’s program is that if you buy something during that session, even if it wasn’t something that I directly linked to from the site, music4dance still gets a (very small) slice of that purchase.
But I still want to be able to listen to a full playlist of songs from the site. I haven’t found a full replacement1, but I have a partial fix in place now. I can generate a static playlist based on part of the music4dance catalog and embed players that point to the playlists. I’ve implemented this for each of the dances pages. So go ahead and browse through to try the embedded Spotify player for your favorite dance.
This solution also has the advantage that these playlists are available directly via Spotify. You can go to the music4dance Spotify Account and browse the public playlists there directly. Go ahead and follow the music4dance account or the individual playlists to make it easy for you to find them in the future.
If there are other song lists on the music4dance site that you are interested in seeing as Spotify Playlists, let me know by responding to this post or sending feedback and I’ll add them to my queue.
Update 2019: I’ve filled another part of the hole created by this change by enabling the export of the songs from a search to a Spotify Playlist – see this post or the help page for more details. ↩︎
The Meaning of TANGO: The Story of the Argentinian Dance by Christine Dennison
This is a fun book for Tango dancers of all types. The book is very centered around traditional Argentine Tango and does an excellent job of conveying that perspective. It’s also somewhat unusual in that it is predominantly about the history and philosophy of the dance but contains a section that is straight up technique with diagrams.
The book is a quick read and full of wonderful tidbits about the dance and its history. Rather than a full-fledged review, I would like to highlight a few points that I feel gave me some useful insight into Argentine Tango. I am someone with a ballroom background and I believe this book helped me understand the dance in a way that I didn’t have even after taking a number of beginning Argentine Tango lessons.
Dance to the Melody
There is a section called “One Name, Many Dances” where the author talks about the relationship between Argentine Tango and ballroom dances. In particular this quote from Freddie Camp, an early German Ballroom dancer:
In Argentina dancers prided themselves on their ability to dance the melody rather than the rhythm. Indeed, Tango orchestras almost never have a drum section. While most other dance music around the world is based on a strong, clear rhythm, generally emphasised by drums, newcomers to Tango music often complain that they find the rhythm of the music difficult to hear. This is one of the qualities that makes Argentinian Tango unique.
The idea of dancing to the melody rather than the rhythm goes a long way to explaining the thing that puzzled me about the practice music that was used in the beginning Argentine Tango lessons that I’ve taken. I felt that the teachers were choosing music where the beat was hard to find, which I would not expect of a beginning class. So I’m going to spend some time listening to the melody of Argentine Tango music and see if I can find myself moving to the melody.
Learning to Lead by Following
I found the description of how Argentine Tango was taught traditionally particularly enlightening. The men would learn in prácticas which were all male and composed predominantly of expert dancers. When learning to follow a young man would spend his formative years being led by experienced dancers. Then he would spend additional years within the práctica leading other men before he ever went to a mix sexed milonga and lead a woman. The fallout of this is that in the context of learning the dance, one was surrounded by experts. Contrast this with the current practice of dance classes where there are one or two teachers and a crowd of inexperienced dancers.
In addition, from a lead’s perspective, learning to follow is invaluable. I didn’t do this until I had years of lead experience and when I finally did spend some time learning to follow it fundamentally changed the way I lead.
The Tango Trinity
Finally, the author talks about the “Tango Trinity”: Tango, Milonga, and Vals. From some other research and some discussion with Argentine Tango dancers, this appears to be the purist’s set of Tango dances. I had originally categorized Neo Tango into the set of Argentine Tango dances, but that appears not to be the case. Based on this, I almost went down the path of pulling Neo Tango from the catalog as a distinct dance and reworked it so that Neo Tango (or Tango Nuevo) would just be a style tag on top of the Tango Trinity dances. But I’m glad I did some further research. It looks like Neo Tango is a distinct style of dance and related to traditional Argentine tango about as closely as Ballroom Tango is.
The main thing that I got from that set of discussions is that Argentine Tango dancers are even more concerned with the tradition of the music that other styles that I’ve studied. I got the impression that some would only consider “true tango music” to be that recorded by a specific set of artists from the golden age. Someday, I’d like to see if I can get things sorted out so that it’s easy to distinguish these from others.
If you have thoughts on the Argentine Tango, the music4dance website or corrections to anything I’ve said about Tango and Tango music, please feel free to comment here or send me feedback.
Also, if this post sparked your interest enough to buy the book, please follow one of the affiliate links below. And as a small aside, any of the Amazon and ITunes links on the site and blog help support the site, so if you find things of interest here, please use the links to make purchases.
music4dance 