What a wedding DJ actually does

Couples book a wedding DJ thinking they are buying music. What they are actually buying is someone who holds the timeline together while a hundred things try to pull it apart.

The music matters, of course. Reading a room full of three generations and finding the record that moves all of them is a real skill, and it is not the same skill as playing a club at 1am.

But the parts that decide whether a wedding runs well are less glamorous. Who hands the microphone to the speaker and takes it back. Whether the sound is loud enough at the back without being painful at the top table. Whether the first dance starts at the right moment or twenty minutes late because nobody told the kitchen.

This is the argument for booking the DJ, the sound and the coordination from one place. Four separate vendors means four people each confident that the delay was somebody else's fault.

When we take a wedding, we build the run-of-show with the couple first, agree the must-plays and the do-not-plays, and put one person on the day whose entire job is keeping the programme moving.