Do you take requests from your audience? And if so, do you play the songs they want to hear?

The single-most important skill for a DJ to have is the ability to read a room, and there is no better tool for finding out what your audience wants to hear than requests. They will literally walk up and tell you what they want to hear. There’s no way to surpass that.

Of course, you have to be judicious when deciding which requests to play, but the same can be said about choosing tracks in general. If the crowd is getting down to ’90s hip hop, you can’t toss any rap track from the ’90s into the mix willy nilly. You will likely have hundreds of songs that may fit the bill, and you have to choose the one you think is the absolute best one at that moment. That’s requests. You may have 15 song requests, and you need to decide which, if any, are the correct choice as the next song.

Plenty of DJs gripe and moan about requests until they are blue in the face, but my honest opinion is that those DJs need to look at the bigger picture. Unless you are legitimately at the star level, and people are showing up to hear whatever you play, you need to put your crowd’s needs first. You may want to be the guy who plays nothing but awesome, obscure new songs that no one but you knows, in hopes of turning people on to your favorite bands, and having those people look up to you as their top tastemaker, but reality is seldom like that. 99.99% of the people who come to see you play just want to hear “their jam.” Most of the time, you can play that jam without being told what it is, because most people’s jam is everyone else’s jam at that time. You play the top 10 songs of the moment and you’ve got it covered. But when someone comes up to let you know what their jam is, your job is to play it.

Often, a group of friends have a special connection to a song, but you won’t know that until they tell you. Once you do know, it becomes a powerful weapon in your DJ arsenal, and in conjunction with your advanced crowd-reading skills, you can determine the exact right moment in which to drop that song. The result? Instant dance floor pandemonium. And isn’t that the goal? Of course it is! So if you aren’t doing so already, elevate your DJ game to the next level and get on out there and take those requests!