At a recent wedding I wondered ' what is that guy doing?' - He must have been the most redundant DJ I've ever come across - and here's why...

The first dance was scheduled at 8:00 - he still hadn't arrived - he finally turned up at 8:45ish and said that he had trouble driving out of the city to this relatively rural location because he had just passed his test (he was in his 30s) and had no sat-nav.

He finally gets all this equipment out and sets it up - mixing desk/PA amp/speakers/2 things that look like double turntables - no idea what they are! plus the ubiquitous laptop. He had no lights so the only lights for the first dance available were my 2 spots. He then proceeds to play lots of motown songs back-to-back. Looking at the footage he looks busy as anything...moving faders, pressing buttons, clicking his touchpad, turning dials....but the same effect could have been achieved by selecting an ipod playlist and pressing 'play'. The clincher came when i wanted him to make an announcement about last call for guest messages - to which he responded "sorry mate - I don't use a microphone". Then it dawned on me I hadn't heard him speak at all.

Given that the average price a wedding DJ charges is about £350 (ive just checked online) that means he charges about a third of what I do for doing about a 20th of the work.

Time to revise my prices :)

Not really - you do video, he plays music. You can't compare the two. I've just played in my band at an F1 event in a foreign country, and we had 6 people including our sound guy, a steel band had 10, and the DJ was on her own - and played music when there were no muso's on stage. When you see the DJ flicking the crossfaders, it's impossible for a non-DJ to see or hear what they're doing - but I do know I can't do that. The days of the Tony Blackburn style DJ are long gone. Modern DJs don't speak at all, they play music, and now many even do video. Scary stuff!

But all that gear - and all I heard was virtually a playlist!

Just joking about the prices BTW

This guy does just about everything wrong. I'm an MC/DJ, 15 years and 500 or so weddings worth of experience and can't tell you how much someone like this pisses me off. But then, I give a sh&t. For some frame of comparison, I'm 30% above market, though that still only gets me $1200 around here.

I'd guess all the button mashing was for show. Lots of guys do it, and if you dig around YouTube you see them getting busted when it's noticed their mixer isn't even hooked up because they're just going from the laptop to the speakers.

It's probably for the best that he didn't speak, though a really great corded microphone, the Shure SM58, can be had for about $100. If you want to hear a DJ complain, have him critique another DJ's microphone work. Bad examples are:
"Hey, everybody! Who's ready to have fun?!" and other cliches
When the DJ says 'Bride and Groom' instead of their names, every time he refers to them, over and over.