Paid song requests: the complete guide for club and bar DJs

Paid song requests let a clubber pay to have a track considered, usually by scanning a QR code near the booth. The real effect is not revenue but filtering — a price collapses the volume of requests and moves the refusal off the floor, so nobody argues with the DJ face to face. On systems built properly the card is authorized rather than charged, and money only moves if the DJ accepts.

In June 2024, a Colchester resident DJ got picked up by DJ Mag, Mixmag Asia and his local paper for a sign taped to his booth. Colin Gingell-Good — DJ PressPlay, resident at Coda — had put up a price list for requests. £250 for Kings of Leon's Sex On Fire. £500 for Oasis' Wonderwall. £1,000 for The Killers' Mr. Brightside. £50 for a birthday request. £100 for a song that doesn't fit the night. £500 for insisting you know better than the DJ. Requests for "good songs that fit the night", per DJ Mag's account of the sign, come free.

He was joking, and said so: "The list is a tongue-in-cheek joke, the majority of people take it as a joke and can laugh about it." But one line in that coverage went unexamined, and it's the only part that matters. Asked about the £1,000 track, he said: "Since I've put the signs up, I had not one person requesting it, so it seems to work."

He never collected the grand. That was never the mechanism. The price didn't monetise the request — it deleted it. A joke sign accidentally demonstrated the real argument for paid requests, and everyone wrote it up as a funny story about Oasis.

Why do DJs charge for song requests?

Because a price is a filter, and the filter is worth more than the money.

It isn't requests that wear you down — a good one from someone reading the room is a gift. It's the volume, and the fact that each arrives as a human at your shoulder mid-mix, expecting an answer in real time, in a room too loud to explain anything. A price does three things to that, in descending order of importance.

It removes the confrontation. This is the point. Saying no to a stranger's face at 1am, when they've had six drinks and it's their mate's birthday, is a cost the DJ pays out of pocket every night. When the request arrives through a phone, the refusal becomes asynchronous and faceless. You decline, they get a notification. Nobody loses face, nobody escalates, nobody gets walked away by security.

It cuts the volume. Attach a price and the asking drops. That's the mechanism behind PressPlay's joke: on his own account, the £1,000 track went from regularly requested to not requested at all, without a single payment changing hands.

It sorts by intent. A free request costs the asker nothing, so it carries no information about how badly they want it. A priced one separates "I'd vaguely enjoy this" from "I will genuinely pay for this." Whether you play it is still your call — you just know which one you're being asked.

Revenue is fourth on that list. Adopt paid requests expecting a second income stream and you'll be disappointed. Adopt them expecting to stop arguing with strangers in the dark and you'll get what you came for.

How does the money actually move?

On a well-built system the payment is an authorization, not a charge. Most people's mental model gets this wrong, and the difference is practical.

An authorization reserves the amount on the card without moving it. Stripe, which several of these platforms run on, documents it as "placing a hold" and gives the hotel booking as its own example — authorize on arrival, capture at check-out. Funds are held, the merchant decides later, and that decision is called capture.

Two consequences separate a good implementation from a bad one.

A declined request produces no refund. There's nothing to refund, because there was never a payment. A refund is a visible, days-long event on a statement — exactly the kind of thing that makes someone hesitate before paying a stranger in a nightclub. A released authorization is a pending line that quietly vanishes.

Holds expire on their own. Stripe notes card authorizations for online payments generally hold funds around seven days before lapsing and moving the payment to canceled. So even if the platform dies and the DJ never touches the request, the guest is never charged. Fair question for any platform you evaluate: do you authorize, or do you charge and refund?

Holds, captures, expiry windows and what a guest sees on their statement are covered in the guide to how authorization holds work for song requests.

What does it actually pay?

Honestly: nobody knows, and anyone quoting a number is estimating.

No platform publishes aggregate earnings data. No independent study of the category exists. If you find a post confidently stating what the average DJ makes per night from requests, check whether it cites anything — researching this piece, none did.

The arithmetic is the part that should affect your decision:

• Commission comes off the top. Published rates vary; unpublished rates are common.
• Card processing fees exist regardless. Either the platform absorbs them or they come out of your share. Ask which.
• Payouts are not instant. Stripe states a first payout generally lands 7 to 14 days after the first payment, and can take longer depending on your country's and industry's risk level. After that, payments made on behalf of a connected account land on that account's balance and pay out daily on a rolling basis by default, though the platform can set a different frequency. Money accepted Saturday is not in your account Sunday.
• It's variable, not a salary. A wedding crowd and a Tuesday bar residency produce completely different numbers, and neither generalises.

Paid requests are a variable top-up on a booking fee, not a replacement. Anyone selling it as a replacement is selling something.

Is it legal to charge for a song request?

The worry behind the question is usually a category error: charging a guest for your attention is not licensing a musical work, and none of the sources below treat the fee itself as the issue. What follows is general information, not legal advice — the rules differ by country, and your booking contract can move them.

Public performance licensing sits with the venue in most cases, not with you. SESAC states that "you, the business owner, need permission from the copyright owner to allow their musical works to be performed", and treats paying a performer and licensing the music as two separate obligations of the business. Venues hold blanket licences with the PROs — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC in the US. DJ.Studio's licensing guide says the same — "in most cases, the venue is responsible for securing the public performance license" — while adding that it's on you to verify the venue actually holds one before you take the gig.

France runs through different institutions and lands in the same place. Service-Public.gouv.fr states that to have the right to play music you must request prior public performance authorisation from Sacem — an obligation it addresses to the operator of the establishment. Sacem also collects, on behalf of Spré, the equitable remuneration owed to performers and producers.

One nuance, again per DJ.Studio: "if you are promoting your own event or playing at a location that isn't a traditional music venue (like a pop-up shop or a public park), you may be the one responsible for obtaining the license" — there's no venue holding one on your behalf. Charging for requests doesn't create that obligation, but it doesn't excuse you from it either.

The open questions are on your side of the ledger: request income is taxable, and how you declare it depends on your status and country. That one is for an accountant, not a blog.

Tax treatment, invoicing and the self-employment side are covered in the guide to the legal and tax side of charging for requests.

Do you need the venue's permission?

Yes — before the first night, not after the first complaint.

Not because it's illegal without it, but because a QR code on the booth is a commercial transaction inside someone else's business. The failure mode isn't a lawsuit; it's a manager who hears about it from a customer and quietly doesn't rebook you. Conversations that go well tend to cover:

• Where the code is displayed, and whether it carries venue branding
• Whether the venue takes a share, and whether you'd accept that
• What happens to requests the venue doesn't want played, regardless of payment
• Whether the venue's promoter or resident already runs something similar

Some venues love it; some refuse outright because it reads as busking on their floor. Find out which before you print anything.

Scripts and framing for that conversation are in the guide to getting the venue on board.

What actually changes in the booth?

Less than the marketing suggests, and more than you'd expect in one specific way.

You still play what you want. Any system that pressures you into playing a track because someone paid is badly designed — you should be able to decline anything, always, without justifying it.

What changes is the physical geography of the job. The queue moves from your shoulder to your phone, and you answer between mixes, on your own clock. The person who used to hover for four minutes waiting for eye contact gets a notification and goes back to their friends. Requests also arrive as data rather than as shouting: a track title you can read, at a moment you can read it, instead of a name yelled into a monitor at 100dB.

Booth workflow, notification timing and handling requests mid-mix are covered in the guide to running paid requests during a set.

What tools exist?

Small category, young, more crowded than most DJs realise. Below is what each platform states publicly, in its own words — it is not a ranking. The taxonomy is fuzzy: Lime DJ, for one, lets a performer make tipping mandatory with a minimum amount per song, which is a paid request wearing a different hat.

Two things that table should tell you honestly.

If DJ software integration matters, REQ is the wrong choice today. Rekwest lists support for Serato DJ, Rekordbox, djay, VirtualDJ and Traktor. Lime DJ delivers requests as a TIDAL playlist and points out that TIDAL can be used inside Serato and Rekordbox — a route into your software rather than a direct plugin. RequestSongs.co advertises a native VirtualDJ plugin. REQ has no integration with any DJ software — requests live in the phone app and nowhere else. If you want a request landing in your prepare crate without typing it, use one of the others.

If you want the widest feature surface, Lime DJ is hard to argue with. Voting, slideshows, lyrics and chords, music bingo, 100+ languages. REQ does one thing.

Where REQ differs is narrow and deliberate. The payment is a Stripe authorization from the start, so a declined or timed-out request produces no charge and no refund. The split is 20% to REQ and 80% to the DJ, with Stripe's processing fees absorbed rather than deducted from the DJ's share. And the DJ can accept a request for free — play the track, cancel the hold, nobody pays. Guests scan a QR code and use a web page with nothing to install; the DJ app is iOS, with Android in preparation. It is in beta, with very few real transactions to date.