How to Actually Vet a Wedding DJ

Forty replies in an hour and no way to tell them apart. The five questions that separate a DJ who has worked your room from one who has not.

Ask a local wedding group for a DJ and you will have forty replies inside an hour. Some names show up twice. A few have a website. One of them is somebody's brother, and he is available, and he is cheap.

None of that tells you anything. The person recommending a DJ went to one wedding. They do not know whether he ran over budget, whether he played the one genre you asked him to avoid, or whether he showed up with a laptop and a Bluetooth speaker. They know they had a good night, which is a review of the open bar as much as anything.

The five questions

A DJ who has worked your room will answer all five in about ninety seconds. One who has not will change the subject to price.

• How many receptions have you worked at my venue, and what does that room do to sound?
• Where can I read reviews that are not on your own website?
• Do we meet before the wedding, and do I get anything in writing out of it?
• What happens if my DJ is sick that morning?
• What exactly is in the price: ceremony music, cocktail hour, dance floor lighting?

That fourth question is the one people forget. A one-person operation has no answer to it. There are seventeen DJs on this roster, which means the answer is that somebody who has read your notes shows up instead.

What our numbers actually are

We would rather give you the real figures than round them up. Google is 5.0 from 145 reviews. The Knot is 4.9 from 68. WeddingWire is 5.0 from 26. Yelp is 4.8 from 6. Every one of those is public and none of them came from a friend of ours in a comment thread.

Before your date we meet, plan the night in the client portal, and put the timeline in writing. That meeting is the part couples mention in reviews more than any single song we played.

Ask the five questions. Ask them of us too.