First – it is important to note that in a survey done by Bride & Groom magazine, found that 81% of guests at a wedding remembered entertainment more than anything else!
It is also worthy to note they found that 78% of wedding couples wished they had made entertainment their highest priority instead of all the flowers, dresses and everything else. Obviously they learned the hard way … you don’t have to because you can learn from their mistake!
People come to a wedding to be entertained. Without the entertainment, it really is just a ceremony where you get married followed by a dinner then everyone leaves because there is nothing to keep people there and entertained.
What an iPad can’t do …
- An iPad can’t look at what is happening on the dance floor and make an educated decision about what song to play next to keep people there. An iPad is a machine, it will just keep plowing through the music as it can’t judge what is actually happening.
- An iPad has no knowledge of song flow. Good song flow is the key to songs making sense and flowing to keep people having a great time. The iPad won’t make educated decisions of which songs work well together. A DJ does exactly that! A DJ knows the music and can put them in an order that makes sense.
- An iPad creates NO atmosphere. Nobody has ever said “Wow, that iPad is certainly creating a great atmosphere!”. A DJ does. A DJ is the human face to the music. Seeing a warm, living person playing music makes getting up and dancing much more inviting than seeing a cold, thoughtless machine mindlessly playing through a playlist.
- A DJ becomes the “gate keeper” to screen your guests requests. They can filter out the inappropriate requests and work the good requests in where they fit, instead of just being next. When you have an iPad, usually guests skip each others songs, put up their own songs and the night generally goes terrible as songs get skipped and the dance floor empties due to people putting on bad choices that don’t fit the song before.
- Even if you DO use an iPad, you will still need speakers to plug it into. (Most venue speakers are TERRIBLE and usually just enough to make do for speeches. Most venues don’t want to spend much money on sound systems). So this means you will need to hire speakers, set them up, pack them up and have someone to operate them. Generally speaker hire itself will set you back a few hundred dollars. We do all this for you as we bring our own good quality speakers and do all the set up and pack up so you don’t have to worry about it.
- Maybe you think you can set up your own playlist so that way nobody will touch the iPad? This almost never works. Unless you have had a lot of experience in music programming, you won’t pull it off. Even we DJs don’t set up a playlist for the night because a playlist is not responsive to what is happening. You might have all the best intentions and set up a great playlist, but what happens when the mood isn’t what you were anticipating and nobody dances? A DJ is responsive and noticing what is happening and changes constantly. (Besides, do you REALLY have time to construct a playlist for the entire night and put it in the right order?).
So, in essence, when you are hiring a DJ you are not paying us so much for our equipment or our music. You are paying for our experience in knowing what to play, when to play it and to provide your guests with a friendly human service to make them feel comfortable. People generally like to deal with people, not machines.
