A company holiday party puts a 24-year-old analyst and a 61-year-old partner on the same dance floor, or fails to. It is the hardest room a DJ plays regularly, harder than a club, because nobody chose to be there for the music and everybody has a different idea of what a party sounds like. This post is about how the set for that room actually gets built: the method, the order, what a do-not-play list does, and why the first song after the speeches carries more weight than any other.
What open format means in practice
Open format is the DJ term for a set that is not tied to a genre. In a club it is a style. In a corporate room it is a necessity. A set for a mixed-age office draws from five or six decades and as many genres, and the skill is not in owning the music, which anyone can, but in sequencing it so that nobody feels the room has been handed to someone else.
The method we use is rotation in short blocks. Two or three songs from one era or style, then a bridge into the next, then two or three more. Not one song at a time, because a group takes about one full song to decide to get up and a second to commit; if the sound changes on every track, the people who were about to move never do. And not long blocks, because twenty minutes of one decade tells the rest of the room to sit down, and a room that has sat down needs to be talked back onto the floor.
The bridges matter more than the blocks. A bridge is a song that belongs to two groups at once: something from the 2000s that the 45-year-olds danced to at their own age and the 25-year-olds know from their parents' cars, or a current track built on a sample the older half of the room recognizes in the first bar. Those songs are the working material of a mixed room. There is a longer explanation of the year-round version in the post on playing a room aged 24 to 64. The holiday party adds two things to it: the office, and the season.
What the office changes
People at a company party are watching each other. The junior staff are watching whether the senior staff dance, and the senior staff are watching whether they would look foolish. The floor tends to open from the middle: the people in their thirties and forties who are established enough not to worry and young enough to want to. If the first songs speak to that group, both ends of the room follow it. If the first songs are aimed at the youngest people in the room, the youngest people dance and everyone else watches, and a floor with an audience is a floor most people will not join.
The other thing the office changes is the ceiling on content. Clean radio edits are the default, not because anyone asks but because the head of HR is in the room and so is the intern's manager. A song can be a clean edit and still be the wrong song for a room where people report to each other on Monday. That judgment is part of the job, and it is why the do-not-play list is worth writing.
What a do-not-play list actually does
A do-not-play list is not a list of songs the client dislikes. It is information about the room. Three or four entries tell a DJ more than an hour of description: the artist who is off-limits because of something in the news, the song that got played at last year's party and became a story, the genre the CEO has said in front of everyone that he cannot stand. Every one of those is a boundary that shapes the set before the first song is chosen.
The please-play list is the same instrument pointed the other way, and it does not have to be long. Five songs from the person organizing the party and five from someone in a different department and a different decade tells us where the center of the room is. If both lists come from one person, the set has one person's center, which is the most common way a mixed room ends up with a two-camp floor. How to write a list that helps is its own post.
On holiday music: the request is usually either some or none, and both are fine. Some means two or three seasonal songs in the arrival hour, when the room is filling and people are still in coats, and perhaps one in the last twenty minutes. Not during dinner, where it turns the room into a department store, and not on the open floor, where almost none of it works at dance tempo. None means none, and it is more common than people expect, particularly when the event is billed as a year-end party rather than a holiday one.
Why the first floor song matters
The program ends. The last speaker sits. There is applause, and then a gap of a few seconds where the room is deciding whether tonight is a dancing night. The first song after that gap is the most consequential choice of the evening, and it is chosen before the party, for this room, not in the moment.
It is almost never the biggest song of the night. The biggest song is spent after the floor exists, when it can be felt. The first song has to be one that the widest possible band of the room recognizes in the first four bars, at a tempo people can walk to rather than one they have to commit to, and it has to be followed by a second and a third that have already been decided, so the first people up are not left standing alone when it ends. From the booth, the sign to watch for is not the young table. It is the first pair of people over fifty. When they stand, the rest of the room has permission.
Eleven years of a Manhattan rooftop residency, where the crowd at six is after-work groups and visitors and the crowd at eleven is something else entirely, is where most of this was learned. A corporate room changes over an evening in the same way, only faster. The music has to change with it without anyone being able to point to the moment it did.
What to tell the DJ before the party
- The rough age spread, and where the middle of it sits. Mostly late twenties to mid-forties, plus the leadership team, is enough to work with.
- Whether partners are invited. A room with partners dances earlier and to different things than a room of colleagues only.
- A do-not-play list and a short please-play list, ideally from two people in different parts of the company.
- Whether you want holiday music, and how much.
- What last year's party was like, if there was one, and what you would change.
That, plus the date, the venue and a headcount, is what we need to build the set. Send it through the contact page or call (201) 705-3139. We reply within 24 hours.