Stop Hiring DJ's
The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 119 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast
It’s pretty much accepted as fact that if you want to have a cool dance party, you need a DJ. This used to be true! DJ stands for “disc jockey,” and the job was to play music on actual records. To keep the party moving, you’d have to play a song on one turntable, and as it was ending, start a song on the other turntable, then crossfade the sound so one song blended into the other. A good DJ never let the music stop. That was the job, and it was important.
That job has been displaced by technology. Spotify has a “crossfade” setting that will keep the music going. All you have to do is make a playlist of fun songs that people want to dance to, then hit play. If you don’t know which songs to pick, just tell it to pick for you. It tends to do a really good job! Scan the list it makes ahead of time and remove anything you don’t like. It takes 10 minutes.
DJ’s know this, so the service they are selling is something else. They cultivate an air of mystique and expertise, and develop a reputation for playing unique, underground tracks that you’d never be able to find on your own. They create exclusive soundscapes you can’t find anywhere else.
The trouble is that underground tracks and unique soundscapes suck. When I go to a dance party, I’m not there to appreciate the DJ’s songcraft and insight. I’m there to dance, and I want to dance to songs I like. I don’t want some underground EDM mix that nobody has ever heard before. I want songs I can sing along to.
The best DJ’s are already doing this, and the value they add is in reading the room and adjusting the list on the fly to include songs this particular crowd is into, and adjusting the energy level to suit what people are feeling. This can be great, but it’s exceedingly rare. Most DJ’s are doing the pretentious thing where they expect you to recognize them as the experts and dance to the music they think you ought to like. Ironically, this is why wedding DJ’s, often the lowest skilled ones, tend to be the best - because it’s expected that the married couple will pick the songs so they just end up playing music the attendees want to dance to.
I get that if you want to have the hippest club in town or whatever, you can’t just put on Taylor Swift, but your party is not the hippest club in town, and Taylor Swift is what people actually want to dance to. So stop hiring DJ’s. Just play music people like. Your guests will thank you.