Concept: Using Medleys to test material on an Audience

[Hoffman6000]

Here's a concept I'd like to discuss.. Has anyone used Medleys (tying a bunch of parts of songs together) to test new material out on an audience? I find medleys cheezy myself, but we find its a good place to find out what a crowd likes without having to learn full songs. If you play a verse and a chorus of 10 songs in a row, the people coming and going on the dancefloor and the people singing along gives a pretty good indication of what will work as full songs....

Anyone had any luck with this?

[JohnMCA72]

I've never tried it for that purpose. For that matter, I haven't done many medleys but I've done a lot of stringing together multiple songs into "mini sets". One thing that can do is to get a better response from a "weaker" song, if it follows a stronger one. A dance floor that's already loaded is easier to keep going than it is to start up in the 1st place, & a song that is transitioned into well can keep a floor going when it wouldn't do a thing as a lead-off.

That effect might skew your results, if you're trying to test songs. In other words, something might seem to be working better because of what it follows, when it might not to so well on its own. I'd expect that effect to be more pronounced with medleys (just parts of songs instead of complete songs, back-to-back) because of the shorter time involved.

[Bob Lee (QSC)]

I've never liked medleys (especially contrived transitions between songs).

But sometimes you can insert songs inside others, if they have similar structures or chord changes or can be restructured in interesting ways. That can be fun if it's done creatively. Don't overdo it, though.