Crowd reading

Crowd reading is watching what is happening in front of you and changing the plan accordingly. It is the least automatable skill in the booth and the one that separates someone playing tracks from someone playing a set.

The signals are concrete even if nobody writes them down: how many people are dancing and how many are looking at their phones, whether they move toward the booth or away from it, what happens in the first thirty seconds of a new track, whether the floor empties when the energy drops or simply breathes. A track that worked last Saturday may not work tonight, and you can see that before it finishes.

It is worth being clear about what a tool like this does and does not do. EnergyCurve works before the gig: it shows you the shape of what you prepared and where it has holes. It does not see the floor, it is not going to, and no amount of prior analysis replaces the decision to throw the plan away three tracks in because the night asked for something else.

What preparation does do is make that decision cheaper. Arriving with a reviewed curve means that when you improvise you are not also solving problems you could have seen from home.