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!
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…
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…
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…
One of the most common requests I’ve received is to support Country Western dances. That request has come in many forms, but I don’t have personal experience with Country Western dancing (well, that’s not 100% true, I learned to West Coast Swing at a Country bar in downtown Seattle that my ballroom dancer friends would hang out at after rehearsing). I’m nearly certain that in adapting music4dance to support more country music, I’ll stick my foot in something stinky and get some negative feedback. I’m all right with that – all feedback will make the site better in the long run, just please try to be gentle 🙂 I’ve also stepped on plenty of toes with Ballroom dance which I know quite a bit about, Argentine Tango, which I know a little about and some of the social dances that fall in between on my personal knowledge spectrum.
And music4dance is pretty complicated to begin with, so adding another dimension may make it harder to use. But I’m hoping that, with your help and some iteration on the idea, we can get things to work even better in the long run.
My initial approach to adding Country Western Dance support is to review the organizations that publish competition rules, including tempo information, and see if I can work those dances into the music4dance system in a way similar to how I’ve set up the competition ballroom dances. This turned out to be easier than I expected. All three organizations that I found online (United Country Western Dance Council, World Country Dance Federation, and American Country Dance Association) list eight competition dances. Triple Two, Polka, Night Club Two Step, Cha Cha, Waltz, Two Step, Swing, and West Coast Swing. Only one of those dances wasn’t already in the database (Triple Two). Polka and Country Two Step were random additions early in the site’s evolution because a couple of DJ friends and lists published by ballroom dance studios included enough songs of those styles to make it worth my while to include them.
My biggest question was, should I create new dances for all of the dances that overlapped? After all, the Cha Cha danced in Country Western competitions is certainly not the Cha Cha I learned competing in American Rhythm (heck, the cha cha that the International Latin dancers were learning in the next room wasn’t the same dance either). I decided to follow the pattern that I’ve already established for Ballroom dances with the same name, even if they are pretty different. Rumba is probably the strongest example in the ballroom catalog of two dances with the same name that are not the same dance. But the characteristics of the music that a dancer cares most about are similar – this is true even of Rumba, where the tempo is significantly different.
Not coincidentally, I recently finished a significant project that allowed me to use the core database to easily and accurately search specifically for American Rumba vs. International Rumba. While there are a few drawbacks to grouping America, International, and Country Cha Cha together, there are a lot of advantages both in terms of how the system works internally and in making it easier to find new music for everyone (I’ve always been a proponent of genre-bending in fiction and cross-over choreography in dance).
So, there is now an active “Country Western Competition Dancing” page, and all of the individual dance pages for dances that include Country styles include the competition info for those dances. I’ll continue to tweak some of this information as I get feedback and do more research.
I realized as I was writing this post that I hadn’t addressed the fact that this change also complicated the voting mechanism. I want to encourage folks to vote on a song being a good Cha Cha, but also make it easy for them to specify Country, International, or American. I made some quick tweaks, but this is definitely a feature still under development.
Please let me know what you think (even – possibly especially – if you think I got it completely wrong). I’m interested in whether there are other Country Western dances that I should include, even if they’re not part of the core competition dances. There was a reference to Country Smooth and Country Rhythm rounds in one of the organizations rules, should I be supporting that? I’ve also used the composite tempos from the rules, combining the different levels to give the broadest range. Should I just be using the most advanced category? What else have I missed?
And as always, if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.
We continue to add to the music4danceHalloween 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.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
I’ve been building music4dance for well over a decade now, and I am still amazed at how passionate people can be about what is right or wrong, not just with respect to dance, but also with many other aspects of the site. Two such instances came up in a recent piece of feedback that I’d like to address, as they are related to ambiguities in language.
Dance
The first is that the site is oriented to a particular local community and is “completely useless” for dancers from other locales. I’ve never heard that specific feedback before. But I do read it as a variation on other feedback that amounts to how I’ve organized the site doesn’t line up with how everyone thinks about dance. I believe that is a good thing. Dance is diverse. A single individual shouldn’t be able to wrap their head around the whole breadth of the dance world, or even something slightly less broad like the partner dance world. Here are some previous posts where I’ve explored this idea in more depth:
I have lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my adult life and learned to dance here. And while I’ve spent some time social dancing over the years, my primary focus was on competitive ballroom dancing. Indeed, with social dancing, there will be some bias towards what I know, and that is the scene in the area where I dance. With ballroom, not so much, as there are standards and organizations.
But the bottom line is that the more the community gets involved, the less the site will reflect my editorial viewpoint. My focus is on making it easier for anyone with an account to add songs and tag them with dances, which will shift the “editorial center” of the site slightly closer to their viewpoint. Some design limitations make it more difficult than I’d like to add new dance styles. But I’ve been rearchitecting the site to make that easier, so if dance styles are missing from the site that you would like to see represented, please get in touch with me. I’ll be happy to work with you to add them. I am also working on a feature that I hope will make it easier to filter on variations of dances – more on that in a future post.
Donate
Another aspect of the site that has bugged me for some time, but that I haven’t addressed, is the use of the word “Donate” on the site. I’ve never received any feedback on this subject before now. However, I understand that using the word ‘donate’ can imply that the money spent would be a tax-deductible donation. That is not my intent, as I would use the phrase “charitable donation” and include a tax ID if it were. If someone could give me a better word than donate, I’d be happy to update the site with it. The only other contender I have come up with is “give,” but that has pretty much the same issue. I have not registered music4dance as a non-profit in any jurisdiction. For more details, please visit the subscription page.
The other word that this person objected to was “contribute.” My intention in using that word was to encompass different ways that someone could help improve the site. That does include monetary contributions in the form of subscriptions or (non-tax-deductible) donations. But it also covers voting on dances, adding songs, sharing the site with friends, and any of the other ways I’ve listed on the contribute page. I’m less concerned about the ambiguity of that term. But apparently at least one other person is, so I’d be happy to change that as well if someone has a better term.
While we’re on the subject of contributions, I want to take the time to thank everyone who has financially contributed to the site, including the person who provided the feedback that inspired this post. Ad and referral revenue only covers about 10% of my core operating costs; your (non-tax-deductible) subscriptions cover more than that. So thank you!
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. I’ve still got a ways to go to get to the goal of covering the core operating costs of music4dance that I set in 2019 when I first turned on the subscription feature, so if you’re not already subscribing and would like to continue to enjoy the site and the blog, please consider contributing (in a non-tax-deductible sense).
Pacific Northwest Ballet included Twila Tharp’sNine Sinatra Songs as part of their Director’s Choice performance this year. I’m not in any way qualified to review a Ballet performance, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a great time playing with the Ballroom-inspired aspects of the dancing as I watched the show unfold. For me, the idea that the dancing was inspired by ballroom rather than in any way attempting to choreograph actual ballroom dance steps on ballet dancers is what made it work (this is the issue I sometimes have with partner dance in Broadway musicals). It was obvious in several of the nine pieces that Ballroom dance inspired the piece, and the upper body shaping and movements felt quite ballroomesque throughout the performance.
On returning home, I hoped to find a resource that listed the dances that Tharp drew from for each of the first eight pieces (the ninth is a reprise group number), but I failed. The notes from some of the performances mention the roots of one or two dances, but it seems like, for the most part, they name the same couple of songs. So, my guess is that even a thorough search of those through the years wouldn’t yield a complete list. As an aside, it was fun to jump down the rabbit hole of the French Apache Dance that Tharp drew from for the choreography for That’s Life. If someone has such a reference, please let me know.
In the meantime, I will take this as inspiration to play a little with the possibilities of music and dance. Sinatra is already well represented in the music4dance catalog, with 166 songs listed before I started filling out the few missing entries from the ballet. But I’ve always thought of dancing Foxtrot to Sinatra or maybe Swing. In the ballet, Tango, Rumba, and Samba were definitely represented. So, I took a few minutes to see what the music4dance community has to say about dancing to this music.
And here’s a custom music4dance playlist that includes all eight songs (although one song is the Perry Como version since the Sinatra version isn’t available on Spotify or iTunes).
The eight songs used in “Nine Sinatra Songs” as shown on music4dance.
Are there other partner dances that Tharp drew from in this work that we should represent in music4dance? Are there other Ballroom-inspired ballets out there worth viewing? Do they use different music that you’d like to add to the catalog? Are there other playlists that you’d like to overlay the music4dance information on, like I did with this one? If you have ideas about this post or the site, please 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.
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.
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…
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…
A lot of our dance groups over here love to dance the partnered dance sea shells The song “Blue night” by Michael learns to Rock sings the song they dance to. Is there a list on your data base of similar songs to that one that they can also dance Sea Shells to?
This question lead me down one of those beautiful rabbit holes that dance often does.
I had never heard of this dance, but I looked it up and found a YouTube video with the choreographer demonstrating the dance. It was 32 counts (four 8-counts) danced line of dance using a vocabulary that I’m not familiar with but would guess was some flavor of country dance.
Now, when I was learning to lead as a ballroom dancer, my teacher often put together a few eight counts of choreography that I could use so that I wouldn’t have to think as much about what my next move was and concentrate instead on leading my partner and making sure I didn’t run into anyone (or step on my partner’s feet). I understand this is a common technique in the Ballroom community. I ran across similar methods when learning social dances in group classes. So my first instinct was – this is just a slightly more formalized version of that technique – and it has the advantage that your follow knows that you will be doing this same sequence, so the lead should be much easier.
Following that thread, I listened to the song more closely and counted it out. It’s about 97BPM 4/4 and had the feel of an International Rumba or Bolero to me. This gave me the first level answer to the question of what else would someone play if people wanted to dance “Sea Shells” – I went to Advanced Search and selected Bolero and Rumba, limited the tempo to 95-99 BPM (an arbitrary bracket around 97 BPM) and sorted by the most popular – that resulted in this list. I’m convinced that someone who learned “Sea Shells” could dance it to any of the top songs on the list.
But I felt like I was missing something fundamental about this type of dance, and I dug deeper. I didn’t have to do much searching to find a “Dance Step Sheet” with the specific choreography that Dan and Kelly Alboro created. In fact, there were a bunch of places that listed this dance and described the steps. Poking around the websites that hosted such sheets, I found that this is a whole thing. Please pardon my ignorance here since I’m sure many people reading this post know more about such things than I do, but the concept of choreographing a few eight counts of a partner dance and naming it was completely new to me.
My understanding from a relatively brief perusal of these sites is that there is a branch of country dancing similar to line dancing where someone choreographs a number of eight counts using a specific vocabulary, teaches it at an event, and then a whole group of people can dance the same “dance.” The most experience I’ve had with these personally is Wedding Line Dances, but it seems like a fun experience. Doing this kind of dance with a partner rather than the individual line dances I’ve seen in the past feels like a great way to become more comfortable as a partner dancer. In any case, I’ll put a bunch of links at the bottom of this post to sites written by people who know a lot more about this than I do.
Back to the original question: Another answer is that some of the “Dance Step Sheets” for “Sea Shells” list an alternate song that it can be danced to. The song they list is “jumpin’ the jetty” by Coastline. Now, this is a song that shouts Swing to me and is considerably faster (126BPM) than “Blue Night.” So that blows my original thought out of the water. Here is a search for swing songs between 124 and 128BPM. Unsurprisingly, there is no overlap between this list and the one I generated for “Blue Night.” I suspect someone who knows the choreography well can probably dance it to any reasonably consistent 4/4 music at a wide range of tempos. For those who are less expert, there is perhaps an advantage to being on the slower side and having strong phrasing. And I’m sure there are plenty of folks who only want to dance this particular dance to the music that they learned it to in the first place. But as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m way out of my depths here, so if someone who actually knows something about this kind of dancing would care to jump in and help me out, please do.
The last thing I wanted to say about this subject is that I’ve had several requests to support country and line dances on the site. I plan to enable the more traditional country partner dances once I get past some infrastructure issues that are currently blocking me from adding a bunch of new dances. I’m confident I can do that and seed the lists from reliable sources to get something up and running despite my lack of specific knowledge of those dances. Then, hopefully members of the community who know more about those dances can add more. Please let me know if you’re interested in this feature. The more people raise their hands for this feature, the faster it will move up my TODO list.
I hadn’t devised a method for handling line dances before this, partly because I assumed they were all choreographed to a single song. It didn’t seem like the system I’d built would handle that very well. But based on this experience, I’ve come up with a way to “support” line dances without adding code. I’ll throw it out there, and if anyone wants to start adding line dances to the database, I’ll document it more closely and possibly even add some code to make the experience smoother. The idea is pretty simple. Just add a comment with a quoted version of the name of the line dance to the song. Then, people can search on that and get a list of songs to line dance to. Here’s the search for “Sea Shells,” which returns the two songs I’ve discussed in this post.
I will dig myself out of the rabbit hole for now and see if I can make some progress on the infrastructure issue I mentioned above.
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.
Some interesting links related to the Western Partner dances:
I recently heard from a member of the music4dance community who hosts a community social ballroom dance for which he builds a playlist. He uses music4dance to find song ideas, then manually builds a spreadsheet and feeds it back into Spotify to create the final playlist.
I have a long-standing interest in making it easier to build playlists. I still have fond memories of my dance coach handing us a CD of custom-cut practice rounds (this was back in the ‘90s). When I started music4dance, I thought that once I had enough data, I’d be able to do some kind of auto-playlist generator where I randomly chose a high-ranked song from each dance type in a competition round and created a playlist that would be suitable to practice to. Unfortunately, the music4dance database isn’t nearly clean enough to do something like that. I’d need to be able to filter down to just songs that are strict-tempo for each dance, which I’m not even close to being able to do.
I’ve communicated with several DJs who use music4dance to build their playlists. It seems pretty common to want to be able to rotate through a pattern of different dances, so maybe there is some there there. The ability to create heterogeneous playlists of songs appropriate for different dances seems like a helpful feature.
But I’m also loathe to define my own playlist format and land myself in a situation where I’m storing everyone’s playlists. I already spend more time maintaining the music4dance code and systems than adding new features, so I want to be careful about creating features that add to that burden. But that’s not a complete blocker; if this is the way to provide the best user experience, I’d be happy to do it. I’d want to take the time to lock down the requirements before implementing a feature like this.
Hence, this blog post. If you use music4dance to build playlists, how do you do it? And what do you want the format of the end result to be? A Spotify Playlist? A spreadsheet? An integration with the DJ software you use? If so, what software? Please let me know.
In addition to the specific asks 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.
The core mission of music4dance.net is to help you find music to dance to, whether you’re a ballroom dancer, social dancer, or really any kind of dancer. Sometimes I look at the site and say, “This could be better.” Or “Here’s a place that I’ve wanted to improve for a while but couldn’t figure out how; maybe I should try something different.” I had an “aha” moment when I was going through the site for my annual Holiday Music post. I’ve been frustrated that many of the lists of songs on music4dance.net default to some nearly random order that tended to put songs on top that only one or two people had voted for. In the Holiday Music catalog, if you choose a specific dance (like Foxtrot), the list is sorted by the number of votes for that dance. But that wasn’t true of the main list, and there wasn’t an obvious way to sort that list by dance votes.
So I took a step back to think about the general problem of getting the songs with the most dance votes to the top of lists and search results and started digging into the corner cases, which is generally where I get stuck on this kind of problem. For song sorting, I was particularly worried about an issue that a customer brought up when I first implemented the general search like google feature that enabled full-text search. In that case, I was sorting by most recent by default, and when the customer tried to do a full-text search, the song he was looking for ended up on the second page of results because there were a bunch of songs that matched his search less well but had been added more recently.
After thinking about this for a while and looking through search history, I concluded that there are two main ways people search for songs to dance to on music4dance.net. The most common search is for a specific song or artist, in which case you want the song you’re searching for to end up as close to the top of the list as possible, whether or not it is highly rated. The other way is to build lists to browse or create playlists from. In these cases, having the most popular songs at the top makes sense (unless you’ve specified something else like tempo).
Given the above, I’m more explicitly handling the case where you don’t specify a sort order as a special “default” case. If you search for specific text, I assume that’s the most important part of your search, and I sort by most relevant to the text part of the search. This part should take care of the customer I mentioned above and folks doing that kind of search. In all other cases, I’ll sort by dance votes. You can, of course, always use the Advanced Search page to specify a sort order to override the default.
One of the reasons that I didn’t do this a long time ago is that there are some other corner cases. The biggest one is that there is no way in the underlying search engine to sort on the sum of the votes for different dances. So I can sort on votes for Rumba or even votes on Rumba, then votes for Cha Cha, but I can’t sort by the sum of the votes for Rumba and Cha Cha or even on the most total votes. I still haven’t fully solved this problem, but I have reduced it to a corner case that I believe is a better compromise than the random sort I started with.
I added a new sortable field in the database representing the sum of all dance votes on each song. With the new field, when looking at the default song list you see when you go to the Song Library, you’ll see the most popular songs on the first page. That also helps pages like the main Holiday Dance Music page, where you’ll also see the most popular songs first. The dance-specific pages were already sorted by dance votes for the Holiday, Broadway, and Halloween pages but not for the main dance lists (e.g., East Coast Swing Songs). That’s now fixed.
Unfortunately, in cases where you search for multiple dance styles, I can’t sort by the sum of the votes of those styles. Instead, I sort by each dance style vote in the order you specified them. So, if you search for all songs with Rumba, Bolero, and Cha Cha votes, you’ll get a list starting with the songs with the most votes for Rumba, then Bolero, and finally by Cha Cha votes. It’s not a perfect solution, but I think it’s still an improvement over the previous random ordering in these cases. What do you think?
Following the line of reasoning that started this post, I’m sure there are things that aren’t quite working for many of you when searching on music4dance. Please let me know. Sometimes, I just need to see the problem to come up with a fix. That’s especially true if you’re using the site in a way I didn’t expect, so even if everything is working smoothly, I’d love to hear how it’s helping you.
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.
Halloween is fast approaching, and I’m updating the music4danceHalloween 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.
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