Stop Booking Random Talent: Build a Music Policy for the Room

Music is one of the fastest ways to build a room, and one of the fastest ways to confuse it.

Everybody in nightlife knows the feeling. The flyer looks right. The venue is ready. The promoter did the outreach. The staff is expecting a certain type of night. Guests walk in with one idea in their head, and then the music tells them something completely different. The DJ may be talented. The room may have potential. The issue is not always ability. Sometimes the issue is alignment.

Nightlife is not dying. It is evolving. In this new era, venues and promoters cannot treat music like a last-minute slot to fill. Music is part of the brand promise. It shapes arrival, energy, identity, spend, retention, content, and whether guests trust the room enough to return.

A DJ booking is not just a name on a flyer

A DJ booking is a business decision. It affects who feels invited, who stays, who dances, who buys another round, who films t...

My assignment Today in writing 101 is to talk about my three favorite songs. I suppose this is something fairly easy for most people, but that is not the case for someone in my line of work. I mean, not only do we have to be on top of what is hot in order to keep our younger clients happy but we need to keep good track of what has been happening throughout the years in not one but many different genres of music. Therefore we have to listen to a lot of different songs. As a matter of fact, when people listen to my iTunes they don't understand why it has no club music at all, my iTunes is filled with classical music, doo-wop and Colombian music you would not understand.

As a newfound love in writing and always having lived around music, there is a goal I have in life which is to write a song at some point in time, so I am going to have to say that one of my favorite songs has not even been born yet and I sure hope to be the father of that baby.

This leaves me with two more favorite son...