Well, in the end the party went on until 6.30am by which time after the amount of alcohol and everything else consumed meant all we wanted was bed!
DJing-wise, I played on and off from 10pm until 5.30am – although it really didn’t feel that long. To be honest there were a few problems. I got badgered all night by people requesting different music styles; everything from indie to “something to sing to”. I even had request for “modern 90s dance music with a 70s twist” – silly me I didn’t set up a playlist with that title!
There were also instances of people wanting to plug in their iPods to play their own music. It was a house party so I said ok, until one guy put on The Eye of The Tiger! I whipped that off immediately.
I got so much grief at one point that people were arguing with each other with some saying “leave him alone” and others requesting music. The funny thing was as soon as I played a request, somebody else would complain about that too. I resorted to effectively doing shout-outs by saying “this one was requested by Phil!”
It got a bit silly with people saying they didn’t like a track, but 2 minutes later they said they loved it – it was the same track! Or people saying “why has the music stopped now?!?!” – it was the breakdown! Dance music tends to have the odd breakdown!
On top of this I had a few technical issues. I had run some of my library through Trainspotter to tidy up the MP3 tag data. Big mistake – every track that I did this with got screwed up and Traktor wouldn’t load it.
That being said there were people that liked what I play and I had people dancing too. The lessons I would take away are make sure you have every conceivable type of music on you, certainly with respect to dance music. For a house party you have to play pretty commercial stuff for the most part.
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