Dance studio owners, who creates the music at your studio? Whose responsibility is it? Since most commercial songs are 3:30 to 4:30 in length, and most dance routines are between 2:00 and 2:55, who does the editing? Is it up to the students? Teachers? You? Or do you use a professional service?
In some studios, the music editing is up to the dance teachers. The teachers are the ones selecting the songs for the students, so it’s up to each one of them individually to get the song edited down to the correct length.
I’m going to suggest that this is not the best scenario to produce optimal results, especially if you run a high quality, top calibre studio.
As a dance teacher, your instructors are experts at many facets of dance, and teaching proper dance techniques to students. However, seamless music editing is not an expertise for a vast majority of dance teachers. The result is that your studio winds up with competition performances that might be visually beautiful, but have a variety of aural scars and mistakes. You wouldn’t put your dancers on stage with tattered costumes, so why would you put dancers on stage with scarred music? Especially for routines that are being graded in Regional or National Competitions, where one of the components is musicality. Especially considering that the music is pumped out to the dancers, audience and judges on high-powered sound systems at loud volumes…. where every pop and glitch is magnified.
Your dance teachers should be working on their choreography, not struggling to figure out how to edit music with no jumps or hiccups, which usually leads to using substandard music in their routines.
Once your teachers have selected the right song for their students, you, as the studio owner, should be enabling them to have their songs professionally remixed for dance routine length. Then your teachers will be using seamless music for their choreography.
You might wish that you could have professional-level music editing, so that your routines sound as good as they look. But the expense might be what’s holding you back. If that’s the case, I’d like to show you how you can use professional quality music editing for your routines AND at the same time make a small profit for your studio on the music. If that sounds appealing to you, email me with the number of recreational and competition students at your studio, and I’ll send you a spreadsheet that shows you how this would work for a studio of your size. It’s a win-win-win proposition for you, your studio, your teachers, and your students.
In a future post, I will lay out a financial case for top-flight remixes for top-flight competition groups.
