Tag Archives: Subscription

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!