Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to dance to. As of this writing, we have 1759 songs cataloged, up from 1536 songs last year and close to doubling the “nearly two hundred” holiday songs I saw when I added the first version of this feature in the twenty-seventeen! Thanks again to everyone who has contributed by adding songs and tagging songs with dances.

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

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

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

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

In addition to the specific ask above, I’m always happy to hear ideas about this post or the site by commenting below or using other feedback mechanisms listed here. And if you enjoy the site or the blog (or both), please consider contributing in whatever way makes sense for you.