I usually write posts about my reading, outdoor, or wine adventures, but today I am going to briefly break from that mold and write a post about wedding planning. Please do not worry, I am not going to change the style of my blog or redesign it with an overabundance of pastel colors. This is just a quick foray into the world of wedding planning, because at this moment, I am spending countless hours planning my own.
The majority of my wedding planning is coming together without a hitch – probably because I was pressured into helping out with dozens of weddings at my ex-church, and therefore, I have a good bit of experience. Food, dress shopping, registries, and so forth have not been much of a problem for me.
Unfortunately, the one giant hole in my planning experience is finding a wedding DJ. Where I grew up, music was appreciated, but dancing was pretty much forbidden. Because of this (and the fact the audio for these weddings, which almost always HAD to be held at the church, where controlled by the church audio team), I had never needed to search for a wedding DJ before.
As with all things attached to the word “wedding”, I instantly noticed that DJs liked to charge an absorbent amount for their services. I understand how live bands charge thousands of dollars to play at a wedding. They have to pay multiple people, and they are also wearing themselves out playing an instrument and singing for hours on end.
However, I can’t understand how a simple DJ could charge $1,000-$2,000 dollars just to sit there and play a list of songs. Truly, I get that a lot more can go into it than that, but I still think the cost is ridiculously high for such an easy task.
As I surfed through the hundreds of wedding DJ listings online, I discovered that it is easy to weed out many of the bad options by answering the questions below:
- Does their web page take forever to load and/or look really bad?
- Do they list their prices on their site? (not a deal breaker, but annoying)
- To contact them for a quote, do you HAVE to call them? (Seriously, email is free; use it.)
- After you send them an email for a quote, do they reply that they want to talk/meet with you instead of giving you a quote? (I get the importance of face-to-face, but if you're that secretive about your cost, you're obviously hiding something. No amount of you talking is going to get me to pay thousands of dollars for a DJ!)
- Is their quote over $1,000?
Looking online is always a good place to start, but another fantastic way to find DJs is by word of mouth. Through one of Dan’s co-workers, we found out about one DJ, and this DJ led us to another one who lives closer to the wedding location. :)
We have not booked with any DJ yet, but now we have multiple people who we can talk to and see who will be the best fit for us. Hurray!
