Tag Archives: Dance DJ

About music4dance

Playlists for Ballroom DJs?

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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.

Special Occasions

Are you ready for your Halloween Dance?

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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.

About music4dance

Please Support www.music4dance.net

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If you’re looking for music ideas for partner dancing, music4dance has something for you.  Whether you’re a competitive ballroom dancer, a social partner dancer, a dance DJ looking for new music, a musician that plays for partner dances, or a couple looking for wedding music, we’ve built an experience that will help. With a catalog of over twenty-five thousand songs cross-referenced by dozens of dance styles and hundreds of tags, we’ve built a real treasure trove of music to explore.

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.

Thanks for your support!