Tag Archives: Holiday Music

Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2025

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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!

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2024

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…

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Please help us catalog new music

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…

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Holiday Music for Partner Dancing

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…

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Special Occasions

Songs for Halloween Ballroom and Partner Dances – 2025 edition

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We continue to add to the music4dance Halloween 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.

About music4dance

Please help us catalog new music

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…

Keep reading
Special Occasions

Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

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…

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Special Occasions

Are you ready for your Halloween Dance?

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…

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Special Occasions

Are you looking for Halloween Music to dance to?

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,…

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Special Occasions

Holiday Music for Ballroom and Partner Dancing 2024

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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.

Special Occasions

Halloween Ballroom Music 2024

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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 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.

Searching for Music

Partner Dance Songs in Broadway Musicals

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We recently attended a production of Peter Pan. This wasn’t a musical we would normally seek out, but it was part of a season that we subscribe to, so what the heck. Perhaps it was because expectations were low or more likely because of the Jerome Robbins choreography, but we quite enjoyed it.

Why am I telling you this? If you check out the cast recording (this is the  1989 recording, but it’s approximately the same songs as the 2024 production), you’ll see a couple of easily recognizable dance names in “Hook’s Tango” and “Captain Hook’s Waltz” and a couple of slightly less recognizable dances (at least to a ballroom dancer) in “Hook’s Tarantella” and “Pirate March.” There is obviously cross-pollination between dancing and music in Broadway musicals and the partner dancing and related music I catalog here. In fact, one of the friends who originally coaxed me into the ballroom dancing world started dancing when he performed in musicals.

That got me going down the path of what we currently have cataloged in the cross-section between musical theatre and partner dance music. I went to the tag cloud page and looked for relevant tags. There were several, which is a mixed blessing and also pretty common in this system where I’m pulling data from various places, including crowd-sourcing. The most relevant tags I found were “Broadway” (30 songs), “Show Tunes” (43 songs), “Musicals” (36 songs), and “Broadway and Vocal” (98 songs). This got me into the same kind of situation as when  I first looked at holiday music where I wanted to do a search that the system doesn’t allow. But like the holiday music issue, this is a limitation of the interface I built rather than the underlying database, so it’s easy enough to further generalize the code I wrote for holiday music and Halloween music and land on an excellent solution for Broadway music.

Broadway soundtracks are a rich source of fun songs to dance to, but even with this custom search, I don’t think the existing music4dance database does it justice. What songs from musicals inspire you to dance? Do the actors dance a recognizable version of the dance on stage, or do the songs just work for the dance style? I’d love to see more songs from Broadway in the catalog. Please feel free to contact me if you have lists in any form, and I’ll incorporate them. Or even better, feel free to add them yourself if you have some favorites.

Also, please let me know if you have ideas for searches that you can’t make work with the existing system. I am considering generalizing the search in a couple of different ways, and ideas from you will help me pick a direction. I am also considering adding a “fun searches” page to share some of the searches you can do with the current system, but it might not be easily discoverable. Send me your favorite fun searches, and if I get enough, I’ll increase the priority of that feature.

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

Ballroom Christmas Music (2023)

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Christmas and other holiday dances are just around the corner, so it’s time to take another look at music ideas to partner dance to.  I haven’t made any major changes to the Holiday Dance Pages this year, but there is plenty of new music to browse.  Last year, we were at 667 songs, and I was hoping to break 1000 for this year.  Which we did.  As of this writing, music4dance has 1536 songs cataloged that are tagged as both Holiday and have some kind of partner dance associated with them.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this effort!

Hear the Beat, Feel the Music: James Joseph

This Holiday season, I am trying something new.  I’ve partnered with James Joseph to offer a special holiday promotion.  From now until the end of the year, if you support music4dance by subscribing at the Bronze ($25) level or donating $25, you’ll receive an electronic copy of Jim’s book Hear the Beat, Feal the Music .  This is a great resource for dancers working on improving their musicality (see my full review here), and I’m grateful to Jim for providing this opportunity for the music4dance community.

Click here to subscribe or donate.

If you aren’t in a position to provide financial support for this project, there are plenty of other ways to contribute.  Specifically, to help build the Holiday Music catalog, you can:

  • Browse our music catalog and tag songs as Holiday when you find them.
  • Add new music through the Add Song form.
  • If you have a list of holiday songs categorized by dance style that you are willing to share, please email me at info@music4dance.net or contact me through the feedback form.

As always, if you have comments or suggestions, please reply to this post or contact me here. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog mentioned above or any other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.

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

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2022

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It’s the time of year again to talk about Holiday Music.

For the second year in a row, I haven’t done any new work on the Holiday Music page other than keeping it up to date with the rest of the site (which sometimes isn’t a small task).  But I have continued to add songs.  As of this writing, there are 953 songs in the holiday catalog, up from 667 songs last year.

Check out the current Holiday Music Catalog here.

If you are interested in helping build the catalog further (maybe we can get to 1000), 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. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog as mentioned above or any of the other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.

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 2021

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It’s the time of year again to talk about Holiday Music.

This year, I haven’t done any new work on the Holiday Music page other than keeping it up to date with the rest of the site.  But I have continued to add songs.  As of this writing, there are 667 songs in the holiday catalog, up from 517 songs last year. And, yes, there were 666 songs before I started writing this post – it seemed inappropriate to have that number of the holiday catalog so I dug up one more song to get to 667.

Check out the current Holiday Music Catalog here.

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. Please consider helping with the music4dance project either by helping with the Holiday Music catalog as mentioned above or any of the other ways listed on the “Contribute” page.