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Searching for Music

Ask music4dance: How do I find a song that people can dance West Coast Swing and Foxtrot to, or Cha Cha and Rumba, or…

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Some of the most vocal members of the music4dance community are folks who either DJ for their studio’s dances or help build the playlists for their community dances, or some variation of the two. The common thread is that they’re using music4dance at various points in their processes and have been kind enough to share the details with me. This has resulted in a number of features that I am sure help more members of the community than my original interlocutor. Thanks again to everyone who has taken the time to share their experiences with music4dance.

The topic at hand is a recent email expressing appreciation for the ability to use the advanced search feature to find songs that can be danced to two or more different dance styles. I realize that I last blogged about this feature in 2015, before I moved the advanced search features to their own page. I missed this post in the review I went through last year to try to update some of the most out-of-date posts and archive the old ones. So I appreciate the reminder.

A little bit of personal history:

When I was first learning to dance, my teacher tried to get me up and able to social dance quickly, including several smooth dances and several rhythm dances. That was totally and completely beyond my capacity, and I spent the better part of a year taking lessons, occasionally showing up to Friday night dances and stumbling through a song or two, but not feeling very good about it. And stepping on too many toes. I clicked in with dancing when a different teacher took me on and convinced me to enter the in-studio competition with an East Coast Swing “solo” piece (what I would now call an exhibition piece – she choreographed the dance to a specific song. We put on costumes and acted out a little scene as part of the dance – pretty close to what most of the performances on Dancing With the Stars are.

With that experience, I graduated to a comfort level with East Coast Swing that I could show up to a dance and dance that one style for the one in 10ish songs that the DJ played. But wait – there is some overlap between East Coast Swing tempo and Slow Foxtrot, at least for social dancing. And the music is of a similar style, since these dances “grew up together” in the Swing Era. And even better – the people dancing Foxtrot were following line of dance around the edge of the dance floor, so we could tear up the middle of the floor with a swing and not disturb the “official” dance. Now I could be up on the floor for one in 5ish songs, and things were starting to feel better. And the rest is history.

How can music4dance help?

But back to the topic at hand. There is a strong motivation when picking songs for a social dance where many styles are represented (which is often true in a traditional ballroom setting) to cater to music that lets newbies dance what they know.  Music4dance makes this easy. If you want to find songs that fall in the overlap between East Coast Swing and Slow Foxtrot, just go to the Advanced Search page and choose each of those dances in the Dances section and click on All (you want the intersection, not the union). Or click here. Then you might want to whittle down that list to the fast end of the Slow Foxtrot and the slow end of the East Coast range – say 128 to 132 BPM, and you get a manageable list of songs to browse through. You can listen to snippets of most songs directly in music4dance. Or, if you’re a premium subscriber, you can export the list to a Spotify playlist and listen to the full songs.

There are a lot of combinations of dances this technique works for, including the dances from the title of this post – West Coast Swing and Slow Foxtrot or Cha Cha and American Rumba are just a couple. Take it for a spin and let me know what you think. And let me know if you use this alongside other features. Or just drop me a line with how you use music4dance. I always read and respond to feedback.

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.

Create a Spotify Playlist

One of my initial goals with music4dance was to be able to create playlists to dance to.  I can finally say that I’ve got this working in a way that is close to my original vision at least for Spotify. The idea is, for instance, that I’d like to build a playlist of Foxtrot songs…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

New Feature: Filter by Song Length

If you’re trying to get a playlist together for a social dance, it would be nice for the songs to be a reasonable length for your audience.  I realize that DJ tools will let you manage this in multiple ways, but sometimes it’s just easier to start with songs in the length range you’d like. There are…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc

Add to a Spotify Playlist Directly from music4dance

A number of people have told me over the years that they create custom Spotify playlists by browsing the music4dance catalog and selecting individual songs. I’ve had ambitions to do all kinds of things to create and manipulate playlists. But it occurred to me, based on a recent conversation, that just the ability to easily…

msc4dnc's avatar by msc4dnc
About music4dance

New Feature: More Spotify Exports

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One of the more active members of the music4dance.net community filed a bug report recently, noting that he tried to create a Spotify Playlist, but it came up empty. The playlist was All West Coast Swing (with at least 3 votes) songs having tempo between 100 and 120 beats per minute including songs edited by sabrinaskandy sorted by Dance Rating from most popular to least popular. Staring on page 4. It never occurred to me that someone would want to export a playlist starting from a page other than one. There was a very good reason in this case. He was interested in trying new music, and the top songs in this search were those with which he was generally already familiar.

On a separate track, I’ve been contemplating ways to distinguish the different tiers of the premium subscription. While I want to keep the core functionality of music4dance open to everyone, and I contend that the main reason to pay for a premium subscription is to support the project, I’d like to start building a few things that are nice bonuses for people who provide more financial support.

So, I’ve fixed the bug and now allow folks with a Silver subscription to export from pages other than the first one. While I was at it, I’ve increased the number of songs you can export to a thousand for anyone with a Bronze subscription. Details are available on the subscriptions page.

While I’m here, please let me know if you want to download song and dance information to a file. I have a beta-level feature in place, but I haven’t seen enough interest in the feature to clean it up and get it fully in projection. It’s not a giant lift, so even a few people expressing interest will tip the scales.

In case you’re wondering, the bug turned out to be that I was paging by 100 rather than 25 during export, so the query in question, which only returned 101 songs, produced nothing when starting from the (4-1)*100 = 300th song.

One other nice side effect of the combination of having the total number of dance votes per song indexed and the ability to export larger playlists is that I can now produce a playlist with the Top 1000 songs, based on the total number of dance votes. I don’t know how practical that playlist is, but I find it fun.

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

Holiday Music for Partner Dancing 2019

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And yet again, it’s that time of year when dancers and DJs are looking for holiday music for routines and holiday dance parties.  In my third annual installment of holiday music posts I’d like to cover some of the new things that I’ve implemented on the music4dance website that make finding holiday music to dance to easier.  For a broader view of holiday music on music for dance please take a quick look at my 2017 and 2018 holiday music blog posts.

As before, the Holiday Dance Music page reveals a list of holiday songs that you can peruse and discover what dances others have danced to them as well as checking out the songs that are filtered by any particular dance style by clicking the dance links at the bottom of the page.

New for 2019, on the individual holiday dance pages you’ll see a Spotify player that will let you play the songs on that page directly from the page or click on the Spotify logo on the player to open up the playlist in your player.  You can also go to the music4dance profile directly in Spotify and browse our holiday playlists.  While you’re their, please take a moment to follow both the music4dance profile and the playlist.

For premium members, you can use the Bonus Content feature to find even more song ideas that I wasn’t able to match to the Spotify, Amazon or Apple Music catalog, but that someone at some time dug up and danced to at a holiday dance.

Also for premium
members, you can now create your own playlists based on searches that include holiday related tags.  For instance, I created a playlist of all songs tagged Christmas
Pop that had an associated dance by just creating a search for all Christmas Pop and exporting to Spotify.

I am going to continue to attempt to build the holiday catalog.  I’ve made some progress, moving from 261 songs last year to 446 songs as of this writing.  If you are interested in helping, here are some things you could do:

  • Sign up for our add song beta and add holiday songs yourself.
  • 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.

Archive

The music4dance Blog Just Moved

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I just moved the music4dance blog and help system to a new provider.  I hate the fact that many recent posts have been about infrastructure changes that I’ve made due to one or another of my providers breaking something under me.  But such is the world of software.  I won’t bore you with the details here (you’re welcome).  At some point I may take the time to explain what happened this time on my technical blog with the hope of saving others similar pain.

What does this mean to you?  Hopefully not a whole lot.  The URL for the blog is now https://music4dance.blog rather than https://www.music4dance.net/blog.  But even if you have bookmarks to the old blog or help, they should redirect smoothly to the new site without any action on your part.  Also, I spent a decent amount of time when I first set up the site to try to make the blog and help system look like a relatively seamless part of the main site.  Not everything that I did directly translates to the new host, so the blog looks a little more like a separate site.   I think that’s all right, but I’m open to other opinions.

The other impact of this change is that I’m now paying for something that used to be free, so I will politely ask again that you consider supporting music4dance.net in one way or another.

As always, I welcome feedback.  I read every email and do my best to respond to them all.

Special Occasions

Dance Pride

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Each year Spotify does a number of fun playlists in support of Pride weekend.  With this being the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, they pulled out all the stops. 

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap between these playlists and songs that are great for partner dancing.  And I’m not just talking about disco music.  I’ve been listening to several of these playlists including Pride Classics and Disco Fever.  The surprise is that it wasn’t until the end of Pride month that it occurred to me that it would be fun and possibly useful to cross reference some of the Pride playlists with the music4dance catalog.

But better late than never.  Click here to see the full list.  You can get to the pride catalog anytime by going to the “Music” menu, choosing the “Tags” option and then finding the “Pride” button.  Clicking on that will pop up a menu that will let you list all the songs tagged as “Pride.”  I’ve also added tags for the specific playlists that Spotify built, so you can use the same method to get to the Disco Fever, Pride Classics or Fierce playlists.

Remember, there is a lot of subjectivity to what someone finds to be a danceable song.  So please sign in and express your opinion by voting on that for your favorite songs and dances. 

If you’re a premium member you can see the full Spotify lists, even the ones that we didn’t already have cross-referenced, by clicking the “Change Search” button on the results and then choosing “Not categorized by dance” and then “Search.”  Then you could go and add what you would dance to any of the songs that are uncategorized.

As always, I’d love to hear your feedback.

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!