When planning your wedding entertainment, you might choose to hire everyone from professional jugglers, to caricaturists, to Elvis impersonators, depending on your personal tastes and preferences, and any theme you might have chosen for your wedding.

But one thing that every wedding reception needs is good music.

People will commonly hire a DJ to handle the tunes for their weddings, and it’s also common for people to organise their own playlists and mixtapes, and to provide DJ services to themselves.

A live band, however, is another experience altogether, and there are many reasons why the readers of this website should strongly consider hiring live bands for their weddings.

Here are just a few of those reasons.

Live music is more intimate and memorable

Have you ever been to a wild rock concert, and felt the whole crowd move in excitement as blinding hit after blinding hit was played? Or maybe you’ve watched a band perform a heartfelt ballad or a folksy tune about lost-love and heartache, to an audience full of weeping people?

Whatever music you’re into, you’ve probably noticed — if you’ve ever been to a concert — that the experience of watching a live band tends to be far more intense than just sitting at home on your own and streaming the same songs off Spotify.

There’s a connection between the audience members, and between the audience and the musicians themselves, and everything is just bigger, more intimate, more memorable, and altogether more meaningful.

As your wedding is one of those occasions in your life where “meaningful”, “intimate”, and “memorable” are exactly the kinds of sensations you’re trying to elicit, a live band is virtually always a superior option to a DJ.

A wedding band can do karaoke and requests

A wedding band don’t just have to play a set list of songs you hand to them, or that they have stored on their laptops. Instead, you can request your favourite songs from them directly, in advance, and can then make additional requests (assuming time and organisation allow) during the reception itself.

A wedding band are also perfectly suited to providing a karaoke experience to guests, and it’ll be a special kind of karaoke experience indeed which involves getting on stage with a real band and singing into a real microphone.

Of course, live musicians aren’t robots designed to meet your every whim. You should check with them in advance what they’re willing and able to do, but you might be surprised by just how many extra activities they can manage.

Audience interaction is likely to be higher with a live band

Audience interaction is a major part of any good party, and a wedding reception should certainly be no different.

While you may well have games organised, dances planned, and all sorts of fun distractions arranged to keep your guests guffawing with laughter and having a great time, music will naturally have a major role to play in audience engagement.

A live band can typically get a crowd singing and dancing along far more effectively than a DJ, and can help to create the kind of vibe where everyone wants to get off their feet and get involved.

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