Our Wedding Playlist
As much as I love live music and want to support some businesses and bands, our budget was never going to stretch to having someone play at our wedding and I have never seen the point of a dj at a wedding. For 25 quid instead we hired the speakers at our venue and I got the Spotify Premium free trial and we created and downloaded a playlist which spanned the whole wedding party and had everyone on the dance-floor.
My tips for saving a few bob and doing your own wedding music;
Spotify is so worth it. I cannot recommend enough downloading the app onto a device you can use all night and get the Premium package so your playlist can play in full with no pesky ads. The free trial lasts three months so you can spend time planning it and have it on the day with no charge but tbh I’d say it’s worth the tenner anyway.
Check out your venue’s capabilities for having your own playlist. Maybe you just need to provide them with it on a USB or send them a link or maybe you need to sort it yourself. For us it was as simple as hooking my iPad up to the speakers with bluetooth and away we went.
If you are using a device, remember it’s charge. Our wedding playlist needed to last about 6 hours of continuous music and my iPad would never hold it’s charge that long so we just hooked it up the mains and it charged happily and kept the music going all night.
Lock your device from guests playing around with the set list. You just don;’t want anyone interfering and a karaoke sesh going on when you’ve curated the most banging playlist so lock your device with a passcode and don’t give it out to guests. Preferably hide the device!
Start strong and end strong. We started with our first dance which was Tom Walker’s ‘Just You & I’ and moved straight into some good dancing songs to keep people up on the dancefloor and I felt very strongly about ending well too. We had about 6 songs to finish that I’d noted at other people’s weddings including Mr Brightside, Don’t Stop Believin, Take Me Home County Roads and ending with Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now which I think is the best last song.
Stick with themes when it comes to choosing your songs. We went through little groups of songs that would get people dancing and it worked really well. There were songs we knew our friends would get up for and songs we knew older guests would boogie too and we kept them together so once they were up, they were likely to stay up for 3 or 4 songs.
Have some slow ones in amongst the fast ones. We had some belters like a bit of Oasis to break up the dancing and I am glad we did because a few people came up to me like PLEASE no more bangers I have to stop dancing.
Don’t be precious over your music choice. I didn’t want to be cool, I didn’t want to pick songs I thought I should pick so people would rate my music choice and knowledge of fun new artists, I wanted people to dance and sing and have an amazing time and I stuck to the cheesiest belters everyone knows and loves and it worked a dream, everyone raved about the playlist after the event.
Listen to your playlist in full before the day. You can order playlists on Spotfiy and I suggest you do a running order not put it on shuffle because when we listened to all 6 hours of ours in full we realised some songs really didn’t work when played one after the other so we made adjustments to suit.
Download it or keep a set list somewhere. I have listened to our wedding playlist in the car already and it brings back such fab memories of the evening, it’ll be lovely to keep a note of and listen back to in the future and feel like we’re back there dancing away into the night with our nearest and dearest.