Weddingbee Blog

Once the photographer was out of the way, the next decision at bat was music. We actually knew early on that our music would be provided by a DJ. Sure, some people say that you can’t have a classy wedding without a live band, but we’re not all that classy and if we have a song in mind, we want to hear that one, not a cover. With the boards’ suggestions in hand, I sent out a bunch of emails being very upfront about our budget and music tastes. It’s not like we are only into house music or only like obscure indie bands that no one has heard of, in fact, quite the opposite. I am a sucker for pop music that gets folks on the dance floor and the Baconator is all about hair bands from the ’80s, so together, we are pretty easy customers.

The Baconator’s favorite band of all time: Van Halen

Video via YouTube

My total guilty pleasure: Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA

Video via YouTube

We had an idea of what local DJs charge from the price lists we got when meeting with the wedding combo companies, so we were confident that we’d be able to negotiate a bit and get a DJ for $1000. Then I got an email that still makes the Baconator get all angsty and left me a bit crestfallen.

Miss Bacon, Congrats on your engagement! I understand you are working with a strict budget, but unfortunately we would be unable to offer you a lower rate. Your date falls smack in the midst of the busiest point of our wedding season, and I am confident that we would be able to book your date out at full rate. If you can find some wiggle room within your budget and meet with a DJ, you will definitely find that we are worth it. There might be DJs out there that are less expensive than we are, but we are competitively priced with other companies of our caliber.

Again, we were thwarted by our super popular date. I mean, I can’t really fault the DJ company for staying firm to their rates, it is a business after all. To make matters worse, we actually require two DJ set ups since cocktails and dinner need music and are on a different floor than the dancing.

I felt really guilty about going back to one of the combo places and trying to negotiate with them since we had already turned down their photography services. Without buying the whole package, we didn’t really have any bargaining chips either. Then there were the couple of other DJs that I had emailed, but I wasn’t as enthused about them. So we sat back and stopped thinking about DJs for a little while.

We let a month go by and took another look at our budget, moved some money from video into music and met face to face with Leslie from Toast & Jam DJs at a local coffee shop. She was awesome and would be working at our venue before our wedding so she would already know the space’s acoustics. She totally got that the Baconator liked Def Leppard before “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was being blasted through college bars across the country… erm, again. She didn’t judge my propensity towards pop sensations like Britney and Taylor Swift. She had a pre-worked “Do Not Play” list that captured all the songs we had in mind and some that we had forgotten we hated. Her boss was right: there are other places we could go, but in the end, Toast & Jam were totally worth the extra couple hundred smackers.

Did you move money around in your budget to make space for a vendor that you couldn’t pass up?