DJ Collective Launches Brooklyn Dance Party Locator
If you’ve ever had an itch to go out dancing, but not an inclination to deal with being in da clurb all night long with the bottle service and bros and women with sparklers and shelling out your entire paycheck, then there’s some good news on the internet for you. You Don’t Have to Settle, a four-person DJ Collective, recently launched YDH2S, a website that purports to be the Oh My Rockness of Brooklyn dance parties. That means that you can look up non-douchey venues for dancing, sorted by price, neighborhood, and genre of music.
“The idea for the website came from a lot of people asking myself and my girlfriend Leila ‘Where should I go dancing?'” explained Brian Pennington (a.k.a. Brian Blackout), a founder of the collective and developer of the site. “Since I’m a web developer by day, I thought it would make a really fun passion project, and potentially solve an issue that a lot of New Yorkers face. From the standpoint of DJs and people who throw parties: how do we reach people who want to come dancing? And from the perspective of people who want to come dancing: how can they find out all of their options? There are some places you can look for parties, but none come even close to listing all of the borough’s parties, many feature just a couple dance parties amidst many other kinds of events, and often they’re pretty complicated either to find or figure out.”
It’s a one-stop listings site, in other words, for the things that most bars and venues only list on their site or on Facebook.
“We don’t attempt to cover every single one of those,” Pennington said. “I don’t know that anyone could, it’s a big borough, but we try to cover a broader range of different dance parties and give people a lot of options, while also making sure to highlight parties we feel will be fun. We do list some events that are a DJ spinning, interesting music where people may not dance, but it’s a room full of people with the DJ setting the ambiance, and those are in the minority for us, usually more weekday affairs.”
And the best dance-related events? “Two of our favorite parties include Tiki Disco, which is giant, sprawling outdoor dance party that happens at multiple venues every Summer, and Sharegroove, which is much nerdier and more intimate and happens regularly at a semi-secret loft in Bushwick, usually,” Pennington said. So, infinitely better than attempting to navigate the crowds in the far-far west side.
