Most of my gigs this year have been with a corporate events/wedding band, jazz standards through recent(ish) hits. Brand new songs generally don't work in those contexts, b/c not a wide enough swath of the room knows them yet.
The sweet spot: songs that were already established floor-fillers when the mid-20s to early 30s bride and wedding party were in high school or college. Not the same as songs that were fresh pop or club hits at the time.
So, Billie Jean and I Wanna Dance w/ Somebody still/always pack a floor, as does Wannabe. We're getting great response this year from Kygo's (2019?) Higher Love (a remix of Whitney's cover of a Stevie Winwood tune).
But unless a current hit is the rare huge hit across popular culture, it seems to take a year or two or three for it to circulate widely enough that it creates a buzz around the entire hall when we play the opening bars. And even then, in this era of fractured playlists, really wide recognition takes time.
Take three pretty similar songs. Rihanna's 2011 "We Found Love" tends to get a bigger "I know this one!" bump from the crowd than Sia's 2016 "Cheap Thrills," which in turn gets more bump than Ava Max's 2018 "Sweet but Psycho."
In my experience over a lot of gigs, none of that vintage of songs (including hits by Usher, the Weeknd, Camila Cabello, etc) currently sparks a mixed-ages event crowd to the extent that Whitney and Lady Gaga and even Britney do. In ten years, maybe some of those recent songs will have stuck around long enough to build ubiquitous recognition. My guess is most won't.
Mega-hits operate on a different level than standard/club hits. But even among the of crop mega-hits released within the past decade, most have been squeezed so many times that they're losing their juice. People still hit the floor for a once-was-everywhere hit like Happy or Get Lucky or Crazy, but those are all well off their peak response, even by the behind-the-curve standards of wedding reception crowds, without yet having rebounded into a nostalgic sweet spot. These are the more likely songs to feel like canonical hits in another ten years.
