So last night i got asked if i wanted to play an 18th birthday party, at 5:30, the gig was at 7. Works been dry recently and i wasnt doing anything so i did it. I was told just play party music/cheese for a few hours, then a bit of well known trance at the end. so i bought a few party albums from iTunes and downloaded some recent charty remixes from soundcloud (i havent played a charty gig in over a year).
The plan was, as usual, go to gig, play what i was told, go home. turns out the promoter (some of you will have heard about my rants about him before) got the gigs mixed up. so i was playing chart tunes to an 18 year old hip hop knowitall who wanted dubstep and dnb as well (only the commercial kind though).
i got an hour and a half into the gig and i had played out ALL my hiphop, and i only have a handfull of dnb and dubstep tracks, let alone anything she would know. so i texted my pal who is a dubstep DJ and he brought up some popular tunes on a usb stick for me to use for the night, that lasted me another hour and a half, an hour to go and i was completely dry, she gave me a playlist of stuff to play and i hadnt heard of a single track on there nevermind owned them so i had to just start from the beginning and play out my hiphop tunes again, and for the first time of the night the dancefloor went empty no matter how many bangers i played. gig finished early as they wanted to go out clubbing so i packed up my stuff and went and seen the parents, who refused to pay me a penny because i didnt play any ‘requests’. Luckilly the booking was a family friend of the promoters and he’s eventually managed to get the money from them.
So say this was you? what would you have done? i had tried asking at the bar if they had wifi (with no luck) and i couldnt get my record pool website up on my phone (i had a usb cable if/when i had to transfer tracks over).
I was thinking of getting one of those internet anywhere dongle thingies (but they cost a fortune for not much downloads) or pending my girlfriends new job, if she gets it, ill get a iphone on the cheap and use itunes straight from that.
I have music from every genre on my laptop, and while I have my preferred styles and stuff I always have enough cheese/party tunes to get through a night if a similar thing happens. For overseas readers I’m sure you have similar,but here in the UK we have the ‘NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC…’ CDs which are complications of all the charity stuff that’s released. If you can borrow or “find” the full set and add a best of 60s and best of 70s set and you’ll be sorted and won’t have to go through this again.
PS where was the gig? I got a last minute call to sound engineer a band in the barras and a similar thing happened. I mixed the band fine and apart from the the owner making me turn it down (they’ve had noise complaints before) it went ok though was still pretty dead when they were on. However once it filled up the exact same thing happened, crowd of young girls moaning at the DJ to play more chart music. I had only taken my sound engineering gear and not my mac/traktor/VCI400 but wished I had.
Lol this was all until one of said girls, during a moan, spilled a drink over the big mixer, the live/band one that the DJ and everything else was running through, with about 20 mins to go and it was game over. Haa much to his relief I think
I’m not sure about where you live, but t-mobile and us cellular offer the mobile hotspot feature for their android devices at no extra cost. My gf uses easytether on her verizon galaxy s to tether. It is a one time $10 fee for the app, but beats paying the $20 or $30 per month fee that verizon chargers.
Was nothing to do with ‘party music’ at all, i could easily play all night with party music, i was told to play party music from my ‘agent’ if you like, which i did to start off then the girl came up and asked what i was doing, she requested a hiphop/dubstep/dnb DJ. I dont dj hiphop (i have two or three big compilation albums on my laptop and some classics but thats it), i dont listen to dubstep at all, and any dnb i have is liquid dnb which i tried to play and got abuse for it. thats when i got given a request sheet full of songs id never heard before.
sh*t happens. You did everything you possibly could. I dont think there’s really anything else you could do. Cant really blame the parents for not wanting to pay either. Really it was the promoter who messed things up, but he also got you your money (like any decent person who skrewed up should of). In the end I think everyone reacted the way they should of and hopefully everything is cool now. I’m sure you hate to have customers think that you arent compotent or any good, but I’m guessing that wether or not they loved or hated you, they have no influence on you getting future gigs around town, and maybe they actually understand the situation you were put in and effort you put in to try and make them happy.
Something kind of similar happend to me years ago. I used to work through a mobile company, they would book the jobs, I would contact the client. This was an easy Sunday morning/afternoon party, I think it was a Birthday party, this was so long ago, like 16-17 years ago. So it was written on the contract that they wanted a little bit of everything and they wanted some Irish music. So when I would see that on a contract it meant that they want a few irsh songs along with everything else. So I had my DJ Tools CDs that had a maybe 3 Irish songs altogether. So I get to this party and its an Irish themed party. Irsh decorations everywhere, they have Irish dancers coming in to perform and here I am, the DJ, with 3 Irish songs. Luckily 1 of the people putting t his together lived 5 min away and had a bunch of Irish music cds and was able to get them for me. The client of course still complained to the company that I wasn’t prepared, didn’t have the music and that I looked messy which I had to agree with considering I got home at 3am from DJing the night before and had to be at this party at like 10am, an hour away from my house to set up so I know I loooked like death lol.
It was a lot harder to get music back then and a lot more is expected in this day and age. I would say that whenever you are doing any mobile gig, any party, you should have at least 50-100 songs in all the popular genres in case of an emergency so you don’t run into a problem where you don’t have the music. In this case though, it doesn’t seem like you had a chance, you were given the wrong information by no fault of your own, you can’t be expected to have this obscure music that some 18yo and their friends listen to that most people never heard of.
Don’t beat yourself up. It sounds like you handled the situation well considering the resources at your disposal. I guess the lesson to be learned here is that you can never have too much music with you, when the need arises.
