I Do BBQ Wedding Reception & DJ

Thank you all for your feedback! Decided to hire a DJ after all. The less stress I can have the day of the better

We're not having a backyard wedding but I've attended one at the cottage and they had no DJ/musician. I'll be honest, it was a little disorganized and messy having everyone just pick what songs they wanted to listen to. If you do go with an iPod or Spotify, have someone exclusively in charge of it.

Yes! We got Spotify premium (so no ads- we had a free trial before the wedding and then it’s like $10/month) and made our own playlist(s) for that day. It worked so well and was saved us a lot of money. We also had 3 different people come up to us that night and say the music was great and can they get a copy of our playlist.

We actually spent a long time going over the playlist after we had picked the songs we wanted included and put them in the order we wanted- that way you don’t end up with to many slow songs bunched together or some of our less child friendly music played early in the night etc.

BBQ reception sounds good and the playlist put together does save more money if DJ isn't worth the cost.

Knowing someone that is a DJ within your friends can help out a lot.

My friends did this for their wedding. They had a laptop hooked up to the sound system and created a few playlists (the first one had a bunch of songs to please the older crowds, and the later playlists were geared more towards the couple's friends.

There were a couple people that were bummed they couldn't request a song, but too bad. It was a fun party and everybody was dancing.

You know what your friends will like to dance to anyways. As long as you have lots of time to build your playlists, then I say go for it.

Hi, Welcome to the Wedding Wire Community and Congratulations on your engagement! I myself am planning on skipping the DJ and doing a playlist. I started with figuring out just how many hours of music I would need and then determined about many songs would be played in 1 hour and then multiplied that # by the # of hours. So far I have a spreadsheet with just bands and songs that I think I might want to add to the final playlist. That's all I got for now!!

I have went to a few weddings where they did this- If you make playlist on shuffle and variety of music it can still go well. Just make sure you have a ton of music and verity. For the important songs, just have a second playlist labeled important wedding songs and have someone play them when needed.

It honestly depends how long you want to spend downloading music and paying for it or getting it that way vs having dj feel a crowd out and managing it all.