How to get people to dance at a wedding

Most weddings have that minute when the dance floor opens and everyone looks around to see who’s going first. Sometimes it takes a song or two. Once a few people are out there, the rest usually follow.

Researchers have studied what gets people moving, on real dance floors and at real concerts, though most of the studies are small. What they found can help at a birthday party or a house party, too.

It looks that way. In 2016, researchers put motion sensors on 46 dancers at a London club for a 31-minute DJ set. The crowd moved most in time with each other on the songs that were better known, which the researchers measured by how often each song had been played online. The catch is that it was one night and about ten songs.

There may be a reason for this in the brain. A 2011 imaging study found that dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical, is released while a listener is looking forward to a favorite moment in a song, before that moment arrives. And it’s hard to look forward to a moment in a song you’ve never heard. That research was done with a small group of people listening to their own favorite music in a scanner. There’s a longer read on why you love a song more the second time if you’d like to dig into it.

For a 2012 study, researchers watched 1,054 songs being played across 30 nights in five venues in the north of England, some with DJs and some with live bands, and counted how many people sang along. People sang more later in the night, on weekends, and to songs that had spent longer in the charts. Songs sung in a full chest voice with clear words got more people singing, too. A single observer did all the counting, though.

The London club study found the crowd was most in sync at beats near walking pace, 100 to 150 beats per minute. A 2018 listening study found a narrower range. People rated drum patterns at around 100 to 120 beats per minute as the ones that most made them want to move. That one was done in a lab, where people listened to the patterns and rated them, so nobody was dancing.

Walking pace has been measured, too. A 2005 study recorded 20 people through their ordinary day and found that people move at a steady 2 steps a second, which is 120 a minute, whatever their age, height or weight. So 120 beats a minute falls inside both of those ranges.

In 2022, researchers at McMaster University ran an experiment at a real electronic-music concert. They set up speakers that play bass too low to hear and switched them on and off every two minutes, while the audience wore motion-capture headbands. People moved about 12% more (11.8%) while the low bass was playing, even though they couldn’t tell when it was on. That was one concert and one style of music.

We found one study, from 2019, that comes close to answering this. In it, one audience watched a rock musician play an album live, and another audience heard the same album played back in the same hall through the same sound system. Motion capture showed that people’s heads moved faster at the live show. That’s a measure of how fast heads moved, which isn’t the same as counting dancers, and there was only one show of each kind.

We don’t have a study for this one, so this is from our own experience. The dance floor seems to work best close enough to the band or DJ that people can feel the music, and far enough away that the volume doesn’t push them back. It helps when guests at their tables can see the floor, because people are more likely to join in when they can see someone already dancing. And dancing tends to get going more easily once the crowd has had a chance to warm up. For more on this, there’s a longer essay on music in a public square, about a summer concert series in a park.

Our musicians usually pick songs most of the crowd knows, keep the tempo in the range people like to move to, and watch the dance floor to decide what to play next. You can get a feel for the kind of songs they play from our song list.

We book bands, DJs and both together, so just let us know what kind of night you want. If you’re still weighing the two, here are our thoughts on choosing a band or a DJ.