Do you really believe that in a room full of 21-35 year olds that 'Brown Eyed Girl' will get them dancing moreso than 'All About that Bass', 'Gangnam Style', or 'Happy'?
I do weddings, where people will specifically request songs. My wedding clients are around the same age as most club goers, and nobody requests those tired old covers, unless it's for one of their parents or grandparents. I'm sure they would dance to 'Mustang Sally' at a bar, but they sure don't ask for it when they are shelling out thousands for a special day.
I'll preface this by saying we're almost exclusively a wedding band; we generally only accept on average one gig per month by band choice, we book exclusively in Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois, and we're true weekend warriors all whose day jobs is what feeds our families.
In response, post #1 is not at all our experience. I would say more than 50% of the time, the sort of wrongly frowned on "unholy trilogy" of tunes, Brown Eyed, Sweet Home and Mustang, get requested after about an hour or two without fail, and almost exclusively by kids the bride and groom's age. Hell, it happened this past Saturday night at a Hockey Fundraiser we played. Brown Eyed and Mustang got requested around 10pm. And it's probably the most packed the dance floor gets all night. There has in the past 5 years or so we've seen, a resurgence of the younger crowd's appreciation for classic rock. Otherwise I don't know how we get so many wedding dance requests to play. Way more than we'd ever accept.
We always have to seem to learn 2-3 new songs each wedding as requested by the bride and groom, usually for the first dance or father daughter dance, but sometimes, just to learn a song. Some are top 40 tunes or pop classics not in our repertoire, others are of the "Rainbow Connection" variety. Many of those find their way into our setlists at subsequent gigs and ranging from country, to "All of me" by John Legend (Tunes like Rainbow Connection, though die an appropriate death after their one and only performance). At weddings it's not just a roomful of 21-25 year olds. It's an equal if not majority of 40-80 year olds (especially at weddings), and we're just not in the business of driving out the 40-80 year olds by the end of the first set, which I've seen DJs and bands do at wedding dances where I've been a guest, through a combination of too loud, too "top 40'ish" or kind of out there stuff. But that's not what good wedding and corporate bands do, especially if they want to keep working. I'll take some of Jive's advice to heart - it is always good to have stuff at weddings for the younger crowd, and learning some of what he suggests is a good idea, and it keeps things fresh. If they want more top 40 tunes all night, though, then I politely tell them we're probably not the band they want. Sure, we'll play Cha Cha Slide and Cupid Shuffle and Rhiana and Beyonce on our breaks through the IPOD, but we know we couldn't do them justice given our configuration, so we don't play those.
I 100% disagree with the preaching aspect of post #1, however, that if bands don't constantly learn new and fresh material, they're all lazy. It's about the audience, not the band.
