Choice of music vs who shows up...

J

JohnK

New Member
This is aimed primarily at the ballroom community, and very related to the demographics thread I posted a few weeks ago:

My weekly ballroom venue has a regular DJ who has been there for a long time. He looks to be in his 60's, and while he plays a wide variety of music, most of it is "the old standards". The "newest" songs are hustles from the disco era.

Not that I need to quickstep to Eminem (assuming this is possible to begin with), but the vintage of the dancers at this venue at least correlates strongly with the vintage of the music being played. Some of us have suggested "fresher" material to little avail.

Anyone else out there face / deal with this? I'm convinced that if we want to cultivate dancers of all ages, we must play music from all era's. Bolero to Norah Jones; ChaCha to Sheryl Crow; FoxTrot to Carly Simon; Tango to Julio Iglesias, Swing to Tony Bennett / BB King, etc, etc, etc
 
The dj at our studio does a great job of playing old standards and some new stuff. She constantly does research to play the current songs. However, as I try to build my own dance music collection (sometimes I play the music for our dances), I'd love some input on good current songs to dance to. Can I hijack your thread for some suggestions?
 
Yeah, I think you're right. One of my favorite ballroom dances to go to has a tendency to have relatively older crowds. The music also reflects this with a large number of foxtrots compared to other dances. Now I'm not sure if one's related to the other. I do recognize that in my music mixes and I try to be a bit more peppish and upbeat (not to mention the fact my own team would rather do club dances than ballroom... sigh).
 
The dance party I usually go to has a DJ who competes with students quite often, and college students come to the dance during the semester as well, so he keeps up with the music quite well. But, in the past I've thought about how I would deal with the problem you're describing if it ever came up.
The DJ is my teacher's husband, so I have a good relationship with each of them. They take suggestions on music quite well.

The most efficient way to go about suggesting something regarding a change in music may be to start with something small and see how it goes over. It's my experience that people will dance the dance to a song as long as it's dance-able. Personally, I would consider doing something like saying "I've come across this song/band/album and you might want to listen to it, there's some great dance music on here" and let them borrow the CD. It wouldn't hurt would go all out and get a Klaus Hallen, Ross Mitchell, or similar album. but you've got your own music in mind I'm sure

PLUG - www.danceplus.com has plenty of selections
also www.ballroomdancers.com

That's what I would consider doing, since I feel comfortable doing that.

Anyways, you are their "customer" in a sense, and they should be happy to receive some feedback. Others at the dances may not know what they're missing when it comes to musical variety!
 
JohnK said:
Some of us have suggested "fresher" material to little avail.
Click to expand...

Sorry, missed that the first time through! Well, there goes my great idea! You've already tried it, bravo!

Plan B:

Copy songs you like onto all of the CD's he plays!
 
That exact problem was solved at one studio when they hired a couple of younger instructors who encouraged all their students to complain. The owners finally admitted they needed a change. The only people who were showing up to their dances were over 70 and I'm not exaggerating.

They finally started bringing in "guest DJ's" which included live music as well as special DJ's who specialize in Ballroom, Latin, Swing.. ect.

The problem is that unless you are a dancer, you don't know what types of songs to play. They are still struggling with the problem, very few bands understand the fine art of social dancing....

What we need is someone to sit down and go through the hundreds of thousands of songs out there and label them as "waltz, foxtrot, tango..etc" then get that info to assorted DJ's around the country. Maybe a GIANT webpage that breaks down the latest songs into dance styles..

:wink: Just don't ask me...

oh yeah.... a simple suggestion is to BRING the new songs to them. We burned several songs for our "first dance" and brought them to the studio to see what type of dance would go with them. The instructor was so excited at the prospect of something new that we couldn't resist giving it to him. Since many of them were from current movie soundtracks, they were inoffensive to the older crowd. ... at least the under 80 crowd anyway..
 
One more thing to note... there are other chances around here to practice one's ballroom dancing but they aren't so successful. $2 for a dance sounds great. The problem is that it's held at the Chapel Hill Senior Center... so you can guess why some people don't go.

It's too bad too... though I'm not a big fan of the floor there. Tuesday and Thursday nights, I have lessons.
 
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