Planning the perfect corporate event, holiday party, team building event, employee appreciation day, company picnic, family reunion, fun fair or other special event is an easy task when working with a professional event planner. Many people planning special events are overwhelmed with fitting event planning tasks into their schedules, especially if it is their first time producing an event.

Selecting the right music for your audience is essential in ensuring your guests have a memorable and enjoyable experience at the event. When hiring a DJ, MC, band, specialty act or musical group it is important to assess the underlying goals of the event.

House music has always been pushed forward by DJ’s wanting and craving new music. Music that their peer’s haven’t yet heard let alone had the ability to own. Music that is upfront and rare.

As the volume of dance labels and artists increased towards the end of the last millennium, mainly due to the ability to produce very highly polished music on a simple pc, the sales quantity of each release decreased as the market did not increase with amount of new music flooding in.

With this change record companies needed to address costs to reflect these lower sales. Label’s looked to technology to help cut the costs of running their business. One major area where this came to fruition was promotions.

For years the DJ’s choice and only option was vinyl, clubs only had vinyl turntables and in the odd instance where they did have CD turntables they were very poor. This changed with the launch of the pioneer CDJ series. DJ’s were suddenly able to do everything they could on vinyl turntables and more but using CD’s.

Labels had previously had only one option to press a run of promotional records to send out to DJ’s. The cost of manufacture and shipping to DJ’s was huge. Overnight DJ’s could use CD’s. It’s much cheaper to manufacture and half the price to ship, an added bonus was that music could be burnt straight from a pc where the track had been written and in a DJ’s hands the following day being played to a packed club that evening.

For labels and producers this was a fantastic way to promote new music and for the DJ this was bliss new music really quickly - fresh and exclusive! All went well with this new format until the mp3 came along.

Suddenly promotional music was finding its way onto the file sharing sites like Lime wire and Soul seek. DJ’s who had been sent music on CD or even emailed as mp3’s began sharing this music.

The thought process behind people doing this went against all that had gone before as most DJ’s hide their secret weapons rather than sharing with anyone at all. This had a knock on by taking the control the labels had of who had their product when and where away. Also potential revenue began being lost and to a section of the music industry where every sale counts this was frustrating and hugely detrimental.

Dance music releases usually only have a shelf life of around 8 weeks. There are obvious exceptions to this rule but 95% of releases are played in clubs and sell for this length of time and that’s it. File sharing screwed this up by both the sales and also the structure of the chosen few influencing bigger DJ’s not having something they can fully get behind during the promotional stage of a release.

Therefore less people got to hear it, less are influenced and less potentially buy it. The industry has never really recovered from file sharing but more recently the sale of mp3’s and specifically dance music mp3’s has boomed and this has helped to a certain extent slow the decline and with time the scene could once again flourish. The one problem dance music has encountered with sales of mp3’s is price but that is another story.

The reason why MP3 is getting so popular is that that MP3 music usually is cheaper than any CD’s or DVD’s and some sites even offer it completely for free.

But the distribution of MP3 files over the internet may also have some downsides. The MP3’s you can download on many sites are protected by copyright, so the distribution and download of these MP3 files is illegal. Although there have been filed several lawsuits over this particular issue, but this practice still continues to flourish.

Luckily there are also some sites that offer only legal MP3 music for download, so you can be assured that all of your downloads from these sites are absolutely legal. No copyright or law will be broken, so you and your MP3 downloads remain secure.