Tag Archives: Halloween

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.

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 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.