Club DJs acted as A&R, deciding which tracks were worth releasing by testing crowd reaction on the floor

In early Chicago house, club DJs performed the A&R function that radio programmers and label executives held elsewhere: they decided which tracks deserved to be pressed. The method was empirical, playing a new track on the floor and reading the crowd’s body response. Ron Hardy played Move Your Body six times in a set, which both tested the record and trained the audience to expect it, so by the end they were ‘going nuts’. This differs from speculative label A&R because the metric is the dancing crowd, and a strong response could even be treated as a competitive asset (Hardy told Jefferson not to share it further).

Examples

Jefferson: ‘I gave it to Ron Hardy and Ron Hardy played it like six times in a row… by the end of that day everybody was going nuts.’ Hardy then told him not to give it to anyone else.

Assessment

How did a Chicago club DJ’s practice serve an A&R function? What metric did Ron Hardy use to judge a track, and what did a strong positive result lead him to do?