The first time Tony and I pitched a Casamoré sunset to somebody in the events world, they squinted at us and said, 'so it's over by 9?' Yes. 'And it starts at 6?' Yes. 'That's not a dance party, that's a cocktail hour.' We've been politely proving that guy wrong for three years.
Here's the case for sunset as a dance floor: the best light of the day is between 6:45 and 8:15 pm in Southwest Florida from April through September. That's not an opinion. That's a literal optical fact about how the atmosphere refracts during that window. You cannot pay for that light. You cannot fake that light. And every dance floor that happens at midnight is throwing it away.
We built Casamoré around that light. When the first drop hits at 7:05, the sun is still a thumb-width above the horizon. When we play the peak of the set at 7:40, the entire sky is tangerine. When we play the comedown at 8:20, the whole beach has gone blue-violet. Nobody is designing dance floors around the time-of-day a paint company would call 'golden hour.' It's an absurd competitive advantage and I can't believe more people aren't taking it.
There's also a social case. A 6-to-9 dance floor includes a lot of people that midnight excludes. It includes parents who need a babysitter for three hours, not seven. It includes the night-shift workers who are coming off at 4 pm. It includes the 60-somethings who frankly do not want to be awake at 2 am but very much still want to dance. It includes the out-of-town couples who drove down for the weekend and would like to actually go to dinner afterward. A sunset dance floor is a bigger tent than a midnight one. Always has been.
And the last case is purely selfish: Tony and I get to eat dinner like normal humans. We play from 6 to 9, we're back at the house by 10, we have an actual meal, we're in bed by midnight. For the first time in either of our DJ careers, we're not eating gas-station sandwiches at 4 am. That has probably added five years to our working life. And our sets have gotten noticeably better since we started sleeping like people.
Sunset, not midnight. It's the best light, it's the biggest crowd, and it lets the DJs stay human. I'd argue the whole industry has been doing this wrong. Come prove me right on May 16.