Karaoke Forums

I knew we'd agree on SOMETHING someday .....

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

I'm not saying 1and 1/2 hours of music, but I don't think one or two dance numbers before the next round begins is going to change the fact it is 95% karaoke. Maybe it should be like booze and have the alcohol content on the bottle. Please sing responsibly.

Then run it that way Lone. The main point in all of this is to make sure people know what to expect when they come to your show and deliver just that.

1/2 hour break? Yes.
The 10-15 Minute Dance Break? No.
The occasional "I will buy a drink for the first person who can tell me who ORIGINALLY sang that song, or who WROTE that song" or some other simple Trivioke. No.

I think what a lot of the long term karaoke hosts don't recognize is that not everyone works in a "karaoke club". Many, in fact I would say most of us actually work in bars where their happens to be karaoke. We perform a balancing act every night.

I am going to be blasphemous for a moment - It isn't always about the singers.

I have to cater to dancers, the casual listeners, the lookey-loos, the drinkers, AND the singers at every place I have ever worked. I would love to land a gig where I could focus only on singers and do only karaoke, but the reality is that I have a lot more to worry about than how many people can I get on stage every night.

My primary focus is karaoke and the singers at all times, but there are other people in my venues thatI have to pay attention to as well.

-Chris

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-Chris

Which supports the old saying play to the crowd.

FINALLY, someone who understands what I am saying!!!

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

When people come into my club for the first time and say, "I didn't know there was a karaoke bar here!", I always respond with, "Because this isn't a karaoke bar! We just happen to do karaoke here on the weekends."

Karaoke bars are the places that run karaoke 4-7 nights a week. I work at bars where there happens to be a karaoke night a few times a week.

-Chris

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-Chris

I have played it both ways and found that it was the younger crowd that wanted the dance music and didn't care how many times they sang or in what order or how many people joined them on stage. I had to do that when I first started a place and didn't have that many singers. I had to keep it going however it would go. There was a certain energy to it that made it fun but it wasn't what I would call a traditional karaoke show.

In the past few weeks the same place has transitioned into a long list of singers and they are starting to get the idea about dancing to the karaoke. So the only dance break has been the Cupid Shuffle.

What I noticed, at this particular place was the dance music people were rude, even throwing beer soaked ping pong balls at me at one point and wanting me to be more DJ than karaoke. The mob screams they did to were fun for them but not something that would attract an audience. Now that I have people who have come to SING karaoke, there are people who are coming to listen and who will dance to the singing. Like Mr. Boo experienced, I got in better singers when it was strictly karaoke.

But I can see different shows working in different situations. I understand about it not just being about the singer as when I first started going to karaoke I never sang but just went for the entertainment and dancing. So I actually loved it when the hosts took "too many turns" as they were real show people, got the dance floor going and they did attract a following. The singers griped about it but the show ran 16 years. I have also been to a "Gong Show" karaoke where there was trivia and lots of jokes in between the singers and it has been long running and packed also.

I think there is just some sort of disconnect about people dancing to karaoke. A few weeks ago my audience was sitting while a singer sang a song. Then as I was loading out they put that same song on the juke box and danced to it. I thought ?????? So lately I've been just dancing by myself when I get the chance and the past few weeks I'm getting more and more people dancing.

Oops. Sorry. Too long a post. Never mind and back to the subject.

Had a fellow come into my show the other night. He is a town fixture with 500 friends on his facebook. Very personable. Great singer. Likes to party. He was a bartender for years so he knows everyone. Has nicknames of endearment. He asked to see my set up as he hosts also. He said he had 60,000 songs on his drive with more coming in all the time. But it doesn't hurt anyone as he just uses it to have fun at home. Except that he offers free shows to his venue owner friends just for fun......

Small towns......

I don't want people to think I don't understand, because I do. As LL (great post) stated, I've been in it two kinds of ways. I am blessed to be in a very healthy, mature relationship with my wife. I was also blessed to have a bunch of ladies that came to my shows that knew what I was about (showman with no horn dogging). Point being, I would usually dance with these ladies for at least a few songs a night. More times than not, they were dragging me out to the floor. My wife got her dances in too. So that was a way for me to help show people they could dance to karaoke and it really did work for me. I also had four songs I sang that the crowd was tuned into and would fill up the floor.

I have done karaoke nights as well over the years (single nights in a bar). The only way to make them work - and it makes your job as a kj a little harder, but it CAN be done - is to keep it karaoke (singers will come), yes it might mean bringing out the wireless, playing popular songs - sometimes with multiplex and walking out in the crowd and sitting with people singing along with them or whatever - it CAN be done, it's a matter of how hard you want it to succeed. I found blow up mics that i'd pass out to the audience, and those that would never sing with a real mic, started singing into the fake mic and eventually found their way to the real mic.
Karaoke is what you were hired for (at least in every bar I've ever worked, they never once asked me they wanted karaoke and whatever else I decided to throw in). Play to the crowd if you aren't getting singers is a cop out IMO and another black mark on the karaoke name.

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I get you on that Lonman but in my case it was me invading a bar and "ruining" a night where the crowd had enjoyed playing beer pong and listening to the juke box. They were so rude about it one night I told the bartender I would just pack up and go home and she said she would weed out the rude people and we would make it work. I did have to get people who were very anti-karaoke singing which meant even overhearing them make jokes about a song, putting that song up and handing them a mic. But there were points where it would have been just me singing song after song and believe me no one wanted that. So I played to what the existing people wanted while trying to build the karaoke. It has ended up being karaoke now.

I was totally in agreement with you on this until last year when I experienced this different kind of 21 to 30 crowd that has a different mindset about karaoke. I would prefer to niche myself into traditional karaoke with dancing (I bring lights when I can to also encourage this--I even promised a pitcher of beer to bring back one group that did dance). But I can see how it does work in some clubs that aim at a young, wild audience to do a hybrid show. And sometimes it does take those clubs a bit of time to decide that the fights and puke and bizillion pitchers of draft aren't as profitable as some more mature people drinking fewer but more expensive drinks.

The other thing I discovered is that at age 60 I am not 21 and even though we all remember our own wild youth each generation has a different slant on how they want to have fun. I don't have the population or numbers of venues to be a niche host so I had to adapt or die.

The place I am at hasn't had karaoke in two years. So I am in the same situation as LL. It's a young crowd, for the most part, I have some regular singers that are there week after week, but they are fine with me playing music in between. As I said, the more singers I have the less music I play. If I had thirty singers I would just leave music on the back burner and you would only hear snippets as the next singer mad their way up to the stage. That's because I hate dead air. Right now I mix music in because I don't have much choice. Five or six regular singers does not a full karaoke show make, and I'm not going to sing myself into laryngitis, either. .

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE