Battle of the… DJs?
The DJ Battle Every Bride-To-Be Needs to Know About
If you’re a bride to be hiring a DJ in the Okanagan Valley, there’s something you need to know about. There is a pretty fierce and competitive wedding DJ war going on. We’re going to quickly summarize this business-battle and why being educated about it can help you make a better hiring choice when choosing entertainment for your wedding.
The first thing that you should know is that there is a mini wedding-DJ war going on. Like any battle there are sides and there are dirty tricks and moves being made against one company to another. Airwaves unfortunately have found ourselves in the middle of this, without even knowing it was going on.
Essentially there are two types of DJs when it comes to weddings. There are hobbyists and professionals. Of the professionals, there are really only two types of those as well, freelancers and companies. When Airwaves first started our company, we used to work with many of the established freelancers. Freelancers are essentially one-man DJ companies that operate solely on their own with no team. Companies on the other hand have multiple DJs and often internal staff as well. In the early days, we would refer all of the one-man companies business and they would send it our way back. There was a great relationship happening and everyone helped one another.
A few years ago, Airwaves grew through word of mouth and quickly became the largest DJ company in the Okanagan Valley. As a result of that, some the freelance DJs decided to work closely with Airwaves on referrals and created strong relationships with our expanding company. Some of the other DJ companies became threatened, worrying that we would take all the business in the Okanagan. As a solution to this, Airwaves sent an email to many of the established freelance DJ companies to let them know that we would only do a certain number of gigs in the valley each year. After that, we would stop. We chose instead to expand and do more weddings in Vancouver and Victoria, where we are still large today.
Every so often we get phone calls from DJ companies to ask us to change the individual names of DJs on our team (not their nickname, their actual name), or ridiculous requests like this. We get threatened to join a certain DJ group and pay huge sums of money or told we won’t be included in their ‘referral network’. Yet each year, Airwaves grows, doing more weddings than any company in the valley by far. Our referral partners continue to do well too, as we have kept our promise to do only a set number of events each year. We feel very lucky to have such a problem, where our DJs word of mouth is so strong that we have to turn away gigs and send them to other, friendly companies.
As a bride, this can be incredibly helpful when shopping for a DJ. We believe in hiring staff members based on their shared values. We feel you should do the same when hiring a DJ, or any vendor for your wedding. Skill is important but skill with a poor attitude isn’t worth very much at all. So hire someone who’s values match yours.
We would never name names in the DJ wars and think they’re kind of silly really. But it dawned on us that this can become a screening tool to help you find the right DJ by creating a few values.
Here are the top 3 values we feel will help you identify a great DJ, with a great attitude and the right values:
1) They will only speak positively of their peers in the industry.
2) They will happily refer a long list of other performers if they aren’t available.
3) They won’t say all companies are bad and all freelancers are good. Both have pros and cons and it is honest to admit them for both.
We are sure there are wedding vendor wars in almost every segment from photography to planning to venues. It is a highly competitive industry. Hopefully this article sheds a little bit of light on how you can use that to your advantage and find out a potential entertainer’s true values before you hire them. Those values may make or break your wedding.
Until then, happy wedding planning and please get in touch with us if you need anything at all!
