A real good example is like if u really wanna hear so good underground techno, u go to a habitat or democracy night.

A good dj set is when the dj is feeding the crowd with energy from his tracks and in turn the crowd gives back this energy. Its the perfect balance.

Its just bullshit when people say you play for the crowd !

ITS ALL IN THE MUSIC !

If you are going to a weelky club night with your friends to have a good time, it is the music and entertainment that is the most important factor – where track selection and the DJ being able to entertain the crowd comes into play.

On the other side, if you are going to an event which you have specifically paid to see a certain DJ, then the other factors come into play are important to me such as beatmatching, entertaining etc as personally, when I pay money to see a DJ specifically, I’m not interested in them playing tunes that I know or tunes that I wanna hear – but more importantly, I want to see them play a solid set with no errors, do some cool things, entertain the crowd, and express their style of DJing through whatever tracks they choose to play.

I think your point jack about song selection is right too, it’s super important. I don’t think you can get away with not mixing tracks and a high level of djing, unless you are someone like Mr Oizo as Troy said. I think fuck ups are bound to happen, everyone has to have some, but it’s about hiding them by changing something else quickly or just pretending like nothin happened!

Don’t worry Troy I’m a wannabedj, but I agree with you! And I think you’re definitely right about the average clubber not knowing. But… from a level of easiness to dance to, as soon as you have any knowledge of beats the flow of a good set becomes aparent, so if you’re dancing and moving at 125 bpm and then suddenly it’s 100, you’re dancing gets thrown off, and you might not know that the dj didn’t beat match, but I can bet that lots of the crowd stops dancing and then goes to the bar. Subconsciously I think it throws people off, and that’s when you get the dancefloor that you can’t predict.

I think we should try this as an experiment! do some trials of people not beatmatching and see what happens. Trouble is controlling the third variable of song selection would be very difficult! Sorry I had to relate it back to psychology…

Alternatively someone like Mr Oizo just sorta smashes tracks in (well of course) as opposed to starting a new tracks way before the old one has finished.

As for track selection know your crowd I guess.

This is all just coming from a wannabedj haha so I guess the pros know what they are doing that’s why they are playing gigs week in week out.

as you know, i don’t think beat-matching is the most important aspect of djing. sure it’s lovely to hear a beautifully mixed set but i would personally rate ‘knowing your crowd and music’ higher. ability in this department provides for good track selection and knowing what will work (and what won’t, and when).

secondly (as alex said), the energy you can bring to a set goes a long way to getting the crowd on your side. if you’re visibly enjoying yourself and keeping the pace of the music up (not necessarily the tempo), people will want to get into it.

if everything comes down to the beat-matching then you have nothing when you fuck up

(just my thoughts, don’t hate)

Seeing the crowd should inform you what kind of music you should play, that doesn’t mean you can’t play something different but a good dj can find tracks that they want to play that the crowd will also like.

A great example was watching XXXchange and few other spankrock djs playing in NYC in support of Dizzee Rascall. The crowd there was mostly indie but the Spankrock DJs wanted to play BMore hip hop but the crowd just weren’t dancing. So the Spankrock DJs started dropping some indie friendly dance tracks to lure the kids onto the floor then started to do some crazy live mash ups with rap vocals then as the crowd was full into dance mode the could tear into the BMore stuff and this time the crowd kept dancing.

The moral of the story i guess is don’t play music you don’t like just to make the crowd happy, but find some kind of middle ground to win them over and lure them into the kind of music that you really want to play.