Not sure how many of you have done middle school dances. I have a gig in about 1.5 months for the 8th grade in my district.( i go the the high school in the same district) I do a big setup and cut the school a break on price, but, my hardest thing is getting them to start dancing. naturally they do after about a half hour of music playing.
It’s 8th grade and i understand that getting them to dance is hard anyways, but what type of music have you had good success with at theses type of events?
In the past i mostly play the “hip” music like stuff played on z107.7, which most of it can be hard to dance to anyways. This year i want to try some more edm and electronic music, big room house type stuff. Similar to what they play at tomorrowland.
Just don’t know how well it goes over with younger crowds.
Im doing a High School dance soon next month actually so I plan on playing top 40 plus Bachata and other specific genres. I’ve passed by a few middle school dances and I think they would like the same top 40 stuff. The middle schoolers are like mini adults just a lot less mature but Im sure they listen to the same things high school kids and adults listen to.
I get z1077 where I live. That’s exactly the stuff you want. The stuff they know. You’ll want to throw some country slow dances and a few rock songs in there too. Bring a notebook for them to write down their requests because they will let you know what they want to hear.
For sure, I was told I would get the requests the end of this week. I have always done that for this annual dance and has been a pretty good direction.
Hopefully there’s nothing weird, last year about a dozen kids voted for one weird Japanese song, it was so bad lol.
For some reason they always request a lot of slow dance, I’ll usually play one an hour.
Middle School dances are all about Top 40/Pop. If you aren’t prepared to play that, you shouldn’t take the gig. You’ll need to pepper a few 80s and 90s songs in there too, but you need to play One Direction, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, etc. because that’s what they want to hear. Also, many of these kids are hoping to slow-dance, so you should be playing 2-3 slow songs per hour at least. I typically do 5-6 up-tempo songs and then 2 slow songs.
High School, at least in California, is more R&B and Hip Hop and some Pop. Anything EDM/Techno/etc. will clear the floor. In any schools around the Bay Area at least, only a handful of kids in any given school will listen to that, and they usually won’t be attending the school dances. That’s really music for 20-somethings in adult clubs. I get that it is great music to mix, but it’s not the music that people hire most Mobile DJs to play.
