I have worked in Radio since I was a junior in high school. Along with being on the air at a radio station came many DJ opportunities. So at the age of 16, I had put together my turntable, my Fathers turntable and some home stereo speakers and a small Radio Shack mixer and I was a DJ. A year later I was working as a DJ for weddings, yes YOUR weddings. I will have more on this later.

Because I did such a great job with the weddings, I received many referrals and was able to pay for my room and board throughout my four years in college. By this time I had upgraded to more professional equipment and I had added a CD player with much reluctance. It was the 80’s and the birth of CD’s after all.

Flash forward 25 years later, after working in radio from Indianapolis, IN to Honolulu, HI, to Glyn Ellen, IL (a suburb of Chicago), and starting and managing my own blues band, emceeing for many jazz and blues events, and starting a Bose Speaker Rental company I came up with the idea for the iPod DJ Service. Ok, I had a little help. Two customers, specifically, called and asked if they could hook up an iPod to my Bose speakers I was renting out. I said sure. Without knowing in advance, both were for weddings. And both thought they were pretty sneaky, because they saved a lot of money on entertainment for their wedding. Both figured, had they told me it was a wedding, I would have charged more. Not true, but I understand where they were coming from.

As a DJ you will charge more for a wedding than a birthday party. Why? With a wedding comes a lot of stress, instructions, announcements, schedules to follow etc. You also have to dress up and put a lot of work into the wedding ahead of time. You end up working two to three times as much as a simple birthday party. It is not because we know wedding couples will spend more on a wedding it is because there is more work involved.

One of those first two customers to plug their iPod into my Bose systems wrote a review about my company. It was short and sweet. “Jeff’s iPod DJ Service was Great!” And the name iPod DJ Service was born. Other DJ’s had been using this name to belittle the practice of replacing them with an iPod. But now thanks to Just Press Play Productions, iPod DJ Service means the customer gets to have complete control of the music played at their wedding. They get to play the songs in the order they want. They get to create the schedule of their dream wedding. And they can save some money.

But remember why I told you DJ’s charge more? Yes, most of that extra work is now being transferred over to you the bride and groom. So you are paying less, but doing a little more of the work yourself. I will continue to talk more about the differences from an iPod DJ to a DJ service in my future blogs.

Now let’s go back to the first paragraph of this blog. Remember the 16 year old with home speakers and turntables working as a DJ at YOUR weddings? He is still out there! And as you go shopping for your DJ you need to be aware of this. My prices as a 16 year old were very reasonable. $200 for a wedding. Of course this is almost 30 years ago, but you can see even then that was affordable. You will hear this many times, don’t shop on price. Many say that because they have an overpriced service, but I am telling you this from my experiences. Price sometimes tells more of the truth than you think. With the iPod DJ Service, the price is less because you are doing a lot of the work. At Just Press Play Productions we compete with those 16 year olds all the time. The reason why they can charge less is because you are getting less experience, less professional equipment and less knowledge about what is needed to make a wedding successful.

So don’t shop on price and if you want to save some money and have more control over what is played and when it is played during your wedding, then look into the iPod DJ Service, but be prepared to do some of the work.

Jeff Ilardi

Owner and President of Just Press Play Productions

With Branches in Chicago, Houston and Oahu Hawaii.

Posted: Friday, January 6th, 2012
Visited 399 times, 2 so far today @ 1:39 am
Categories: Wedding Blog, Wedding DJ, Wedding Vendor.
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