The Playlist Problem

A playlist cannot see the floor thinning at 9:40. What a phone in a dock actually costs you, and the one wedding where it works.

A playlist is free and your taste is good. That is a real argument, and anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something. So here is the honest version of where it breaks.

A playlist cannot see the room

At about 9:40 a floor either fills or empties, and it happens over the course of two songs. A DJ standing in that room watches it happen and changes the next three tracks. A playlist plays the fourth song on a list written six weeks earlier by two people who were not yet tired, and it keeps playing it while the floor clears.

Nothing you can do in advance solves this. The information does not exist until the night is happening.

The song you queued in June was chosen for a room you had not stood in yet.

The job is not the music

The music is maybe half of it. The rest is the grand entrance cued to the door actually opening, the toast microphone that works the first time, the caterer who needs four more minutes, the tempo held steady through the tempo change nobody notices. Somebody has to make the announcements, and it should not be your best man holding a phone.

When a playlist is genuinely fine

Small reception, under about forty guests, no formal dances, seated dinner and a short night. A good playlist and a decent speaker will carry that, and we will tell you so if you call and describe it.

What a playlist will not carry is a hundred and fifty people, five segments and a floor you want full at eleven.