Reading A Crowd and Building Your Dance Floor

By DJ Airek

The ability to manipulate and control many different occurrences, of many different things, at many different times, would be an incredible attribute to being a great DJ.  Being able to multi-task your brain to perform several different functions at one time would also be a key necessity.   Maintaining your grasp on your creativity, the mental and physical actions required to complete your creative thoughts, and reading a room to analyze your crowd for feedback, can be a very brain tasking thing to accomplish.  Several different components of DJing must successfully come together at the right times to guarantee a successful performance.  Although each individual component of DJing has it's own importance, each is equally the number one priority when analyzed individually.  Winning at every level of placing the components together will guarantee you a winning performance.  

One very necessary component in actually performing as a DJ, is reading the crowd.  Now, consider the factors that you are dealing with in your analysis of this gathering of people on your dance floor.  Lets assume that you are the DJ ultimately responsible for getting the fire going, the opening DJ.  Ooooh!  I know that you are cringing at the thought of being the first DJ on the decks.  Normally, one would think that being the opening DJ is a disease that is mutually unwanted by anyone confident enough to call them self a DJ.  Not true.  In any given night club situation, someone is tasked to put people on the clubs dance floor before the big dog closing DJ arrives.  This responsibility is a great one to have.  It is this responsibility that we will make reference to for an examples sake of how to read and respond to a crowd. 

 Lets put you in a place and time.  For assumptions sake, assume that you are in a medium sized night club with approximately 350 people in attendance.  The club is about 65% full.   People are beginning to get their cocktails and drift towards the dance floor.  You, being the experienced, confident DJ that you are, are pumping the music of the moment.  What elements of feed back can you see coming back your way  from the dance floor?  By the way, its 10:45 PM in our hypothetical little night club.  There are approximately 75 people on the dance floor.  Can you see their body language?  Are they standing around, swaying to and from to the beat?  Are they smiling?  Making blank faces?  Is any one accidentally spilling a portion of their cocktail as they dance?  Can you identify someone who has entered a state of dancing and isn't even in your club anymore?  Do you have a few groups of girls dancing together?  Girls love to dance in big groups.  Or, have you just captured a few of them, and the rest of them are still chatting at the bar with friends?  These and many, many more, are existing factors that can help you to analyze your dance floor and modify your performance to make more people dance.  The glory of the situation is that no two will ever be the same.

How well you receive the feedback from your audience, and how well you return what they need to them, will determine how you are remembered by those people.  An invisible synergy exists between the DJ and his crowd.  Both rely on and hang in the balance of what the other does. 

Another key element to developing a relationship with your audience can come by way of making eye contact with them.  Don't allow the DJ booth to become a box that holds you in.  Interact with the people and make eye contact with as many people as you can.  Facial gestures can be a great ammunition to you.  Acknowledge the people that you can directly in front on you, and try to somehow let those further back in the crowd know that you see them, and that they are important to your performance.   Waving at people and being in the spotlight is why you are there.  Learning to communicate with you eyes and body language can be a great enhancement to your DJ performances.

Several other factors exist in the hypothetical club we are using in our example.  The bar can be a great source of information for the DJ.  If you can see the bar from your vantage point, you can see how many people are standing at it, and who they are.  Where are the girls?  Where are the guys?  Where is that big group of people that came into the club from that huge limo bus?  Are people really slamming the bar to get drinks, or are people just standing around it for the social element?  How many people are at the bar, compared to the amount that are on the dance floor?  How is the seating situation?  Are a lot of people sitting around entertaining themselves? 

Being aware of how the crowd communicates with you, the DJ, is a key attribute to possess.  This form of communication is a majority of non vocal feed back.  People don't really tell you what they want to hear, they just walk off the dance floor and non vocally issue you the challenge to bring them back based on how you adjust your performance.  To associate this method of interaction to a game of chess would not be an uneducated association.  You make a move, then they make one.  This game continues all night, record after record, mix after mix, until the lights come on and everyone goes home.

If you do end up losing the dance floor for a moment its not the end of the world, but the end could be close.  Thinking fast on your feet at that moment, can be the difference between you being eaten by the dancing natives or becoming their king at the end of the fairytale.  Identifying the point where you have lost your crowd could possibly be the most important trait to possess.  Since time is of the essence in re-programming and recovering a diminishing dance floor, it is absolutely critical to be able to identify that point where you lost them.  If you can remember what you were projecting at them right before the moment where you lost them, you can recover much faster than if you start all over with a totally new style.  Go back to what was working and figure out a way to expand on what you had going.  We have personally witnessed some big name DJs lose the vibe on the dance floor, but it is their experience, quick reaction, and rapid recovery from it that makes them the big names that they are. 

An endless amount of factors and circumstances will exist in any and every different situation.  You are the one who takes the extra time to do your research on who you are performing for, so you ultimately reap the reward of satisfying those people at the end of the night.  Think of it like you are the referee in a game.  You have to see everything.  No one is going to inform you of the things that we brought up here.  Most people can't even see them.  It is for this reason that you are doing the job that you are.   Being a DJ is millions of more things than just changing one record to the next.  Reading a crowd isn't the only thing to make you a better DJ, it is just one of them.  Good Luck with the natives!