Frim Fram Jukebox Night: The Results
The grand experiment that was Jukebox Night at Frim Fram went off without a hitch last night, and turned out even better than I’d hoped! Crowd participation was a little lighter than I was hoping for, but in retrospect, it was probably about the same ratio of people picking songs as might have been plugging quarters into an actual jukebox anywhere else.
Regardless, those people picking songs evidently have pretty good taste, and had everyone seemed to have a great time. I got a lot of positive feedback and many requests to have another go at it sometime soon.
Leading up to the night, I put together a list of about 450 songs for the jukebox list. It was a fairly large range of artists, styles and tempos - old favorites like “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and “Massachusetts,” neo-swing bombshells like “Zoot Suit Riot,” barnburners like “Man from Mars” and “Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie,” and slow tunes like “Night Time (Is the Right Time)” and “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say.” In all, almost 120 songs got at least one vote from the crowd, and 5-6 votes seemed to be the magic number to get a song to bubble up to the top of the queue.
One great thing that I saw happening (that I didn’t really anticipate) was that once dancers realized that they could get friends to “stuff the ballot box,” there was a lot of running around and convincing folks with iOS devices to ♥ their favorites and move them up the list. Remarkably, I did not have to fiddle with the queue at all to prevent clearing the floor.
I’m really glad I brought all of the extra iOS devices for crowd use - we had an iPod Touch at the bar and on the DJ booth we had my iPhone, both set up for requests and votes. Unfortunately, I learned last week that Remote on iPad is not compatible with iTunes DJ for some bizarre reason, but I setup my iPad to connect with Home Sharing to give some extra availability. Home Sharing basically gives that device “super user” privileges so I had to keep an extra eye on that so people weren’t requesting KISS or anything crazy. Dancers were using that iPad frequently to see how their songs were faring and how the updated queue was shaping up.
I had a second iPad that showed the album cover view of the currently playing song, which was kind of fun. I wish someone had gotten a picture of the setup and am kicking myself for not asking someone to do so. Anyway, next time I might get fancy and bring along the Apple TV to plug into one of the flatscreens, and turn on mirroring on an iPad so everyone can see the queue developing as the night progresses on the overhead TV.
In the end it was a great success and I’ll definitely consider doing it again. In the meantime, check out the event thread on Yehoodi.com for the playlist from last night, all songs selected by the great crowd of dancers at Frim Fram.
20 Apr 2012, 10:31 am
