For a DJ, a request can be the best and worst part of their whole night. You see, getting requests at a wedding is similar to when you ask your co-workers where you should go for lunch. You know where you want to go, but you are being nice by asking everyone else what they want. You inevitably get 10 answers and ultimately, piss off a bunch of people because you had to decide and you can't go to 10 different places. You probably would have been better off just going to lunch yourself and picking up something for everyone while you were there.
Trying to make everyone happy with your choice for lunch is fairly similar to how a DJ feels when it comes to playing a requested song. As a DJ, wait, let me start over again. As a great DJ, we have an idea of what we are going to play throughout the night. We use cocktail hour and dinner to read the crowd. We pay attention things like the age groups and ethnicities of your guests. What they are taping their feet to, what they are singing along with, and what they are getting up and dancing to.
We have all been to weddings that have a DJ that has no clue what he is doing. He is simply playing the music in no particular order and with no particular reason. We have a reason for playing every song we play. We don’t just randomly play a song. We have a diagram in our head of where we want to take the crowd. We have a whole plan on how the music is going to progress, keeping in mind all the things you want to get accomplished during your event.
So when a request is made, a change is made to that plan. And usually a change for the worse, because, for the most part, the requests we get simply won’t work. There are just no good reasons for playing both versions of the electric slide, the cha cha slide and the cupid shuffle at your event. But ultimately, we get hit with those requests at every single wedding we do. Imagine if we listened to every request your guests made, we would have 25 minutes of line dances. Instead, we have to filter. We have to figure out what the best song to play is - and the request might not be it.
For example, you gave us 3 slow songs you want to hear throughout the night. During the dancing set, one of your uncles comes up and he and his wife want to hear their wedding song, thus adding another slow song. We generally only play three to four slow songs at a wedding. So there is a good chance we won’t be able to play it, because you have already given us three. So we tell him, we will try. He comes back an hour later, and this time, he has had a few drinks. He wants the song next, because he is leaving. Now what do we do? We have a full dance floor. The other 198 people are rocking it out on the floor, but I have your uncle who thinks we are the worst DJs ever because we didn’t play his song. And worse yet, because we tell him we can’t play it next, he is now headed over to you, the bride and groom, to tell you what is going on.
Trying to make everyone happy with your choice for lunch is fairly similar to how a DJ feels when it comes to playing a requested song. As a DJ, wait, let me start over again. As a great DJ, we have an idea of what we are going to play throughout the night. We use cocktail hour and dinner to read the crowd. We pay attention things like the age groups and ethnicities of your guests. What they are taping their feet to, what they are singing along with, and what they are getting up and dancing to.
We have all been to weddings that have a DJ that has no clue what he is doing. He is simply playing the music in no particular order and with no particular reason. We have a reason for playing every song we play. We don’t just randomly play a song. We have a diagram in our head of where we want to take the crowd. We have a whole plan on how the music is going to progress, keeping in mind all the things you want to get accomplished during your event.
So when a request is made, a change is made to that plan. And usually a change for the worse, because, for the most part, the requests we get simply won’t work. There are just no good reasons for playing both versions of the electric slide, the cha cha slide and the cupid shuffle at your event. But ultimately, we get hit with those requests at every single wedding we do. Imagine if we listened to every request your guests made, we would have 25 minutes of line dances. Instead, we have to filter. We have to figure out what the best song to play is - and the request might not be it.
For example, you gave us 3 slow songs you want to hear throughout the night. During the dancing set, one of your uncles comes up and he and his wife want to hear their wedding song, thus adding another slow song. We generally only play three to four slow songs at a wedding. So there is a good chance we won’t be able to play it, because you have already given us three. So we tell him, we will try. He comes back an hour later, and this time, he has had a few drinks. He wants the song next, because he is leaving. Now what do we do? We have a full dance floor. The other 198 people are rocking it out on the floor, but I have your uncle who thinks we are the worst DJs ever because we didn’t play his song. And worse yet, because we tell him we can’t play it next, he is now headed over to you, the bride and groom, to tell you what is going on.
In that situation, we understand that your uncle will probably tell you how bad we were the next day, but we also understand that we can’t change the party for everybody for the requests of a few. We will be the bad guys on some songs and we will make sure that we only pick the best songs out of the request lists from your guests. Keep in mind that many of the requests are songs we are going to play anyway. So we don’t want to not accept requests. We just want you to know that not every one gets played. A request is just that, a request.
-Jason
-Jason
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