Asking your wedding guests for song requests in advance sounds like an excellent idea. You're going to have perhaps a hundred people at your wedding, all with wildly different musical tastes, so why not ask everyone what they'd like to hear and hand the resulting list to your DJ? Everyone gets something they like, nobody can complain about the music and the DJ gets a useful head start. Unfortunately, what you tend to end up with is less a carefully curated picture of what your guests will dance to and more a fascinating survey of songs people enjoy listening to while driving.
This is because people are surprisingly bad at predicting what they'll want to dance to several months from now. Ask somebody in February what they'd like to hear at your wedding in August and they'll quite reasonably choose a song they like. They aren't imagining themselves at 10.47pm, four glasses of wine in, surrounded by twenty old friends while somebody's aunt has just started dancing with her shoes in her hands. They're sitting on their sofa filling in your wedding RSVP. These are very different environments. A thoughtful choice of favourite song can look absolutely watertight on a spreadsheet and then produce complete indifference when introduced to an actual dancefloor.
There is another problem, which is that asking for requests can quietly turn them into expectations. If thirty guests have each been invited to nominate a song, you've potentially created thirty people who now have a small personal stake in whether their selection gets played. Some will have chosen brilliantly. Others will have selected a seven-minute album track from a band they saw at university in 2009 and will spend the evening periodically approaching the DJ to enquire when its moment is coming. It may never come. This isn't because I'm being difficult; it might simply be that the dancefloor is currently full, something else is working beautifully and stopping everything to honour Dave's advance request would be a peculiar thing to do. The strange thing about a good party is that what actually happens in the room should probably be allowed to outrank what everybody predicted might happen six months earlier.
None of this means I don't want requests. I love requests. They can tell me an enormous amount about a group of people, particularly when someone comes over and says, “There are about twelve of us here who used to go mad for this at university.” That's useful information. So is discovering that the bride's family inexplicably loses its mind whenever Fleetwood Mac comes on, or that a seemingly random 90s dance record has some history attached to it that I couldn't possibly have known. Requests made during the party come with context. I can see who's asking, what's happening around them and whether the idea has a fighting chance. And sometimes somebody asks for something I'd never have thought of, I take a punt on it and they turn out to be completely right. I rather enjoy those.
So by all means ask your guests about music if that's part of the fun, but I wouldn't turn your invitations into a democratic song-selection exercise. Your wedding isn't a referendum and the playlist doesn't need proportional representation. Give your DJ a good sense of your own taste, mention the songs and musical oddities that actually mean something to your friends and family, and then let people make requests when they're standing in the room and can see what sort of party they're actually at. Music is wonderfully dependent on context. That's part of what makes DJing interesting in the first place.
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Why Your Wedding DJ Should Probably Arrive Before Your Guests Do.
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