Okay, maybe the title of the article is a little click-baity, because obviously beat-matching is necessary. A DJ has to blend songs and the BPMs need to be lined up to do that. Except, what if maybe he doesn’t? So yeah, I stand by the title. Is Beat-matching necessary?

My answer is that it’s a good skill to have, and it is nearly never a bad idea to mix between two beat-matched songs, but I believe it is far less important than most DJs believe it to be. Granted, if I were to perform for an audience composed entirely of the people will will read this article, I’d better be a grandmaster of the art. That’s because I believe it is safe to assume that 99% or more of the readers of the Heavy Hits blog are DJs, and when one DJ listens to another DJ play, he tends to be hyper-critical of the performer’s skills. Even the slightest errors in beat-matching, phrasing, volume, or any other aspect of a mix won’t go unnoticed.

The same cannot be said for the general public, and as it is the general public who will make up the vast majority of your audience, those are the only people you really need to please. Do they care about beat-matching? Not in the slightest. Most of them aren’t even aware that beats can be matched. They want to enjoy some music, and possibly dance, and couldn’t care less about any of the hows or whys that go into making that music happen.

I know what I’m saying goes against everything you believe about DJ’ing, and right now you are shaking your head in disbelief that I actually think people don’t notice, if only on a subconscious level, that music sound better when skillfully mixed. It does, don’t get me wrong, but my experience, after many decades of DJ’ing professionally, is that people simply don’t care. As long as you play the right songs, nothing else matters to most people.

Here’s a story that underscores my point. About a decade into my DJ career I was setting up to DJ a party, and just as I was ready to begin I realized my headphones weren’t working. I had no time to run out an buy a new pair, and had no choice but to DJ without headphones. Keep in mind, this was in the 1990s, and I was mixing actual vinyl records, so I had no hot cues to trigger, no waveforms to consult. Everything had to be mixed by ear, in headphones, or there would be no mixing. And so, that night, for 4 hours I DJ’ed for about 200 college kids without mixing anything. Worse, I had to cue songs up live in the speakers. Songs with a spoken intro? Zip past it live in the master out for all to hear. Every single song for 4 hours just scratched in, or dropped in, or beat-matched live in the house system for all to hear. That client continued to hire me to DJ 6 events a year for the next several years.

At the end of the night, I went to apologize to the social committee. They hadn’t even noticed. No one had. Literally no one I spoke to that night was even aware that what I’d done was different from what any other DJ had done. The dance floor stayed full the entire night, the energy was high, and everyone had a great time. Because they heard the right songs.

Don’t take any of this to mean you should be lazy as a DJ, or you should not be constantly working to refine your skills. Merely realize that what is most important to you, as a DJ, about your performance, may not register at all with your audience.