How to Build a Great Party Playlist Using Song BPM

What is BPM:

BPM stands for Beats Per Minute, it’s basically a unit used to measure the tempo of music. When you want to build a great party playlist, you want to make sure that you use BPM to create “waves” of music that help excite and enchant your partiers. How do you do that:

Depending on your party style of course, you want to keep people going up and down in energy level.

First, establish your baseline BPM. Find some songs you think have a good energy level, not too high, and not too low, and use the BPM for these songs as the average BPM for your party playlist.

Now that you know your baseline, you need to determine your BPM range. Find some songs with much higher BPM and much lower BPM and see if they suit the people you’re inviting to the party. E.g. if you are hosting a party for senior citizens, you won’t want songs with very high BPM because they won’t like them and might also die if they try to keep up…:)

You also need to consider the genre of the songs. In most cases, mixed genres work well, but if you are hosting a party for the Hip-Hop awards show, you should probably stick to the party genre and not stray too much into other areas.

Now that you have your baseline and range, your job is easy. You’ll need to build your party playlist so that the list cycles through 6 -10 songs going from low BPM range, to baseline BPM, to high BPM range.

After you’ve built your first cycle, you need to cycle down, but when you do that, make it shorter (3-5 songs) and also don’t go back down to the starting BPM you used, go back to a slightly higher BPM.

If you do that over and over during the party, your partiers will slowly be building up their energy levels and depending on how many songs you have, and how long the party is, you’ll end up with a super energized crowd by the end of the night, not wanting to go home and wanting to keep going and building more and more energy and fun.

One thing you need to remember is to make sure you don’t go too low in energy level so that people don’t lose their buzz, or too high in energy level for too long so people don’t burn out. This is more of a trial and error thing depending on who the people in the party are and how well you know their taste in music.