Really, Really Old School!

I’d probably look at iTunes and Amazon Music for starters.

Maybe hit up your local second hand music stores (if you have any) and seek out any CD compilations you can rip into files.

I’ll admit that it is a skill I haven’t practiced for a while, but you could beat-mix this stuff on vinyl! Finger on the label and speed up/slow down the platter a little as the track was playing. It’s easier with CDJ style players and controllers of course. It DOES take some more effort, but hey, we are professionals, right?

I am playing friday at a wedding. The bride a 50-yo professor, the groom also a 60-yo academic. Family members from two totally different cultural areas of the country, friends in the couples ages and co-workers anywhere from 25-35. Guests from 3 or 4 countries.

With quite a few restrictions on what to play and what not.

I have all the music, that is not going to be the challenge. The challenge will be, as always, to pick those tunes that make the evening work for all/most of the guests and the happy couple.

Will be interesting.

Thanks, with 39 years on the decks I think I will manage 😀

Karlton, besides Terry’s good suggestion, I would recommend using Spotify, too, because there’re tons of playlists there that you can use to identify songs you might not remember right now (I speak as someone in his 50s that plays this stuff many times each year).

As for getting the files, as D-Jam said iTunes and Amazon are great choices.

However, if you’re giggibg on a regular basis, and have the necessary ways to document it, I would strongly suggest you become a member of the Digital Music Service (DMS) record pool, which has a good back catalog that includes files with DJ intros and outros and also short edits, re-drums and remixes.

The DJ Intelligence website has some pretty decent TOP XXs lists. As well as a 200 most requested at weddings I think. Only problem with all these lists is that they are pretty much country specific, especially the older stuff. In Holland we were pretty US-centric, but still lots of other influences, like UK, Germany and Italy (Italo-Disco). If you look at UK charts for a time period, you will find there are lots of tracks that never made it into the Dutch charts. Play that at a party here and you will get stunned looks and people walking away to sit down.

Another good example is Cerrone – Love in C Minor. It is featured in many best disco tracks of all times (and in the top 10 usually!). This song never ever did anything here. So little so that I wonder if it was ever actually released here. So a song that would get people going in the US would be a wipe-out here.

That said, there are quite a few other sites that have best dance or disco music charts too, often grouped by decade. And while there is probably none that is the ACTUAL best chart, if you take three or four of the top 50 lists of a decade, you can come up with a common denominator list for that decade that will have you covered.

It’s as good a starting place as any. And thanks to Spotify and Youtube you can probably listen to all of them to select which one fit your style the best.

I use a lot of this type of music for my varied genre sets, and there is some great reading above… Thanks guys for the replies, and thanks to the Op for making this post! Keep shining folks… Isaiah