Should I give my wedding DJ a playlist?

Every couple asks me this, and the honest answer is that you should absolutely give your DJ music, and you should absolutely not give them a running order. Those are two different documents and confusing them is the most common self-inflicted wound at a reception.

What your DJ needs from you is taste. What they do not need is sequencing, because sequencing is the skill you are paying for.

Thirty songs is plenty. Enough to show your range, your era, the two or three genres you actually love, and the family songs that will mean something to the room. Add a short note next to any track with a story attached, because a DJ who knows a song belongs to your parents will place it where your parents can hear it.

Then five names on a do-not-play list. Five is usually all anybody genuinely feels strongly about, and a short list gets respected in a way a long one never does.

A hundred and forty songs in fixed order. It sounds thorough and it is actually an instruction to stop reading the room. Every experienced entertainer has played a wedding like this, watched the floor thin out by nine, and been unable to do anything about it because the couple asked for exactly this.

The second unhelpful version is the shared playlist that friends have been adding to for four months. It is a lovely idea and it is not a wedding set. Hand it over as information, not as the plan.

Pick these yourself and pick them early: the processional, the recessional, your entrance into the reception, the first dance, the parent dances, and the last song. Six choices. Those are yours, they are personal, and no DJ should be guessing.

Everything between dinner and the last song belongs to the professional standing at the decks.

The most useful thing you can write is not a song at all. It is a sentence about your guests. My family dances, his family talks. Half the room is from Quebec. My grandmother is ninety-one and I want her on the floor for one song early.

Entertainers who plan carefully, like Top Hat Entertainment in South Burlington or Epic Entertainment Boston down in Canton, will take a paragraph like that and build an entire evening around it.

Asking guests for a song on the RSVP card is charming and mostly harmless, as long as everyone understands it is a suggestion box rather than a queue. Pass the results to your DJ as a mood board. Expect maybe a third of them to be playable in a wedding set, which is a perfectly good hit rate.

If handing over control makes you uneasy, that unease is worth listening to. It usually means you have not found the right entertainer yet, and the fix is to keep looking rather than to write a longer list. Read our piece on how to know if a wedding DJ is good and interview one more.

When you are ready, put your night together on the 802 Events planner and send your request to the entertainers you like best. Every one of them sits in our New England vendor directory with their real reviews attached.