After being out for two months — we have one question for y’all: Did you miss us? We realize many of you had to go into detox after missing your weekly dose of Party Favorz but we’re finally back in business but with a new twist.
2023 is without a doubt the final year for Party Favorz so we want to make the most of it as we can. We started the year off at a deficit but promise to make it up to everyone with a steady stream of today’s hottest dance mixes and classic House Music tracks. After all, we still need to finish the Millennial Dance Classics series and plan on refreshing some past Diva Hall of Fame inductions. In some cases, we’ll just add new tracks while other episodes will get a complete overhaul. We were hoping for a new Madonna album to drop this year but for now, that doesn’t appear to be in the cards as she gears up for her world tour. We’re also planning on a slimmed-down Gay Anthems For A New Generation that only includes the essentials as well as a slimmed-down Thank God It’s Disco that does the same.
The first thing you’ll notice is that we’ve dropped the paywall for the year and will solely be relying on donations to fuel the podcast. We’ve done this before and it worked well but it seemed a bit unfair because the majority of the donations came from the same people who previously subscribed but everyone else was along for the free ride. Our costs this year to run this podcast are up 500% and no — we’re not being hyperbolic. We upgraded the podcast hosting plan which costs more as well as dropped a chunk on the donation software to keep everything in-house and will be upgrading our hosting service by the end of the week as that comes up for renewal.
The nice thing is, you can take the feed for the podcast and use it with the streaming service of your choice. Feeds are limited to 300 episodes, so in the next couple of weeks, we’ll be creating category episodes so more of the past 16 years will be available if you subscribe to just the category of choice as opposed to the main feed. We should be back up in Apple Podcasts soon. Everything was taken down when one of the hosts we were using decided to submit it themselves not realizing Party Favorz was already in Apple Podcasts and suddenly all the categories were active but pulling from the main feed instead of the actual category. I guess they think so little of their users’ ability to navigate the system they proactively push their podcasts out to the top streaming services on their behalf. At Party Favorz, we’re not novices so thanks but you did us no favor.
Keep in mind that because the feed was transferred so many times, everything got screwed up and we’re having to manually enter the URLs into each post. We’re also replacing the scaled artwork with the originals so it’s a time-consuming process. For the moment, only episodes from 2017 forward are available. We’ll be adding an additional year of episodes each week. If there’s something you want right now, you can reach out to us in the contact section and we’ll do our best to get it up as soon as possible. Just don’t take advantage of our generosity with a multitude of requests or you will be ignored. All episodes will be available by summer.
Party Favorz has ALWAYS supported the artists and their music by paying for legitimate DJ services and when not available (more often than you think) — we spend a great deal of money at Beatport and Traxsource every month as well. Unlike other dance music podcasts, Party Favorz provides accurate set lists so that folks that just want the meat of each song can search them out on Spotify, Apple Music, or their preferred streaming platform and add them to their own playlist. We don’t conceal the titles of the songs unless they’re a bootleg or mashup in which case we go with what they’re titled.
Except when DJs offer their remixes for free or we receive promotional material straight from the source, Party Favorz has been supporting DJs from around the world for over a decade and expanded our support during the pandemic to ensure they’d be able to weather the storm. I can assure you that Party Favorz supports artists and working DJs more than any other platform. In fact, with our reach, we’ve turned several of them into in-demand performers after elevating their work to a larger audience. It’s always been our goal to support DJs, artists, and labels (especially smaller indie labels) so they can enjoy the fruits of their labor.
That being said, with the amount of time, work, and sweat that goes into creating this experience, Party Favorz needs to be able to justify our work and cover our expenses. We’ve never gotten rich off the backs of other people’s work and all proceeds went right back into our creative efforts and all the mechanics (which aren’t free) that undergird the internal workings of this podcast and website. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to spend a month in the life behind the scenes. What you’ll find is that we tirelessly work 6 – 7 days a week to ensure not only the integrity of the website but bring listeners the very best that the dance universe has to offer.
If donations aren’t working, we’ll add a gentle prod at the beginning of each episode reminding listeners that our work to bring you these episodes doesn’t come for free. The curation of each episode can take up to two days before we even start the mix. Then there’s the artwork, the tagging of tracks, and a whole host of other things you take for granted that must be done to make just one episode. If the gentle prod doesn’t work, we’ll consider cutting access off to key categories strictly for donors. It wasn’t our intent to lecture our audience in our first post back — rather, we just want everyone to understand that we don’t just pull all of this out of our ass and throw it together making it magically appear.
For the moment, we’ll give this a try because we believe in the work, we believe in the community, we believe in the artists and the DJs and our goal has always been to create an experience everyone can enjoy while sharing our passion for all things House Music. In short, this isn’t a hobby.
We have a new episode dropping early Sunday morning (eastern time) and look forward to our return. We’ll try to keep drops on Fridays or Saturdays but felt it was important to lay down how this is all going to work before we start rolling. Until tomorrow…ENJOY!
Thanks for joining our party at Party Favorz! Your support helps keep the party alive. Please consider helping out by donating?
