It’s All About Your Audience

Are you playing for swing dancers or snotty 16-year-old punks? Do you have roots in hip-hop but your crowd is begging for dance rock? Is some guy in a cowboy hat sucking down a Pabst Blue Ribbon giving you an evil eye because you’re playing Eminem? Does the girl with the pierced eyelids truly appreciate the Mozart you’re bustin out? (Can she even see?) This might seem far-fetched but you’ll run into similar situations at many mobile parties. The key to success as a mobile or club DJ is timing combined with effective and relevant music 

programming. You’ve got to know your audience and what they’ll respond to. Hopefully, you’ll have a clue before you get tossed into the situation, but you’ll often walk in blind. Even the best prepared mobile DJ's with all of their forms and music lists submitted before the affair can run into unexpected surprises that find them unprepared.

I had that experience at a wedding reception. I wasn’t aware that the bride’s mother had filled out the song request sheet in advance because the bride assured me that she and her fiancé worked on it together. Obviously, mom’s tastes were a little different than her daughter’s. I was prepared for this big elegant affair with lots of disco and traditional dance rock. The bride and groom had recently come back from an early honeymoon cruise to the islands where all they danced to was reggae, and naturally, they wanted major reggae at their wedding reception. The problem was that no one told me this, so I was short on reggae that day. Fortunately, I brought my cell phone and arranged to have someone bring my reggae collection to the affair.

I constantly had to remind myself that I was buying this music specifically for DJ use. I didn’t necessarily like the songs I bought, but I knew that a majority of my mobile and club customers would respond to it. Unless you’re becoming a DJ as a hobby and just making mix CDs or tapes for your friends, it’s important to remember that you’re usually not playing for yourself. You’ll need to open your mind play a lot of music you’ll probably hate.

Most situations a beginner DJ will face involve familiar music rather than non-familiar music. Mobile DJ's and mainstream club DJ's are limited to playing music everyone already knows. Big city club audiences tend to be trendier, always looking for the next big thing. So big city club DJ's can get away with breaking new records no one has ever heard. Fortunately, this is a good thing for new DJ's. You’ll have the luxury of time to learn the classics you’ll need to learn before you’ll get a job at the big city club. By that time, you’ll have a large knowledge of music, and a better sense of which new or non-familiar records will generate a positive response.