You may have noticed that there aren't many wedding DJ awards on this website. In fact, there aren't any. No little gold badges in the footer, no South West Wedding Entertainmer Of The Year 2026 rosette, no photograph of me standing in a hotel function room holding a piece of engraved glass. This isn't because I've entered lots of awards and suffered a long sequence of humiliating defeats. I've just never been interested in entering them. I realise this puts me slightly at odds with an industry that is extremely fond of trophies, accreditations, recommended-supplier badges and anything else that can be reproduced underneath an email signature.
It's not that I think awards are worthless. If you've won one, congratulations. Seriously. It's just that I've never been particularly interested in jumping through hoops to convince somebody that I'm good at my job.
I'd rather just be good at my job.
There are excellent DJs who've won them, and I'm sure there are well-run awards judged by people who take the whole thing very seriously. I understand the appeal too. If you're planning a wedding and trying to choose between dozens of suppliers you've never met, a badge saying WINNER offers a comforting little shortcut. Somebody, somewhere, has apparently inspected this person and concluded that they're good. My slight difficulty is that DJing doesn't lend itself particularly well to being judged at a distance. You can look at photographs of somebody's setup, read testimonials, inspect a website and perhaps watch a nicely edited video, but the interesting part of the job happens in a room at 10.43pm when something you were convinced would work hasn't, half the guests have gone to the bar and you need to decide what to do next.
I've been DJing professionally for a long time now, in clubs, festivals, stadiums, weddings and plenty of rooms considerably less glamorous than any of those descriptions suggest. I've played to thousands of people and I've also played to eighty people who appeared, collectively, to have forgotten what music was. The latter is often more educational. Experience gradually teaches you when to persist, when to change direction, when a request that sounds ridiculous is actually brilliant and when the beautifully prepared playlist needs to be put to one side because something much more interesting is happening in front of you. None of this is particularly photogenic. There isn't much of an award submission in noticed bride's dad singing along near the bar and changed direction for twenty minutes, but decisions like that are where the job lives.
I suppose that's why I've never felt a great urge to have a panel tell me whether I'm doing it properly. The people I need to impress are already in the room. They're the couple who trusted me with their party, the people on the dancefloor and the guest who appears at the end of the night looking slightly dishevelled to tell me they haven't danced that much in years. Even more satisfying is when someone books me because they were at another wedding I played. There's something pleasingly uncomplicated about that recommendation: they saw the whole evening, including the bits before the photographer's highlight reel, and decided they'd like the same person at theirs. I'll take that fairly seriously.
So if awards are useful to you when choosing a DJ, by all means look at them. I just wouldn't confuse having one with being the right person for your wedding. Listen to how a DJ talks about music. Read what their couples actually say. Listen to their mixes, if they have them. Speak to them and decide whether you trust their judgement. Then worry about the badges if you still want to. As for me, after nearly two decades of doing this, I'm quite content with the less tangible forms of recognition: recommendations, repeat bookings, lovely messages the morning after and rooms full of people having a better time than they ever expected to. Those are the awards that I'm interested in. And thankfully I don't have to apply for them.
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