[alanross]

For me, I don't let the first rotation go longer than an hour and a half - two hours, tops. After about an hour and a half, you start losing the people who've already sung their first song and don't feel like waiting three hours to sing another four-minute song.

Especially if you live in an area where there is a lot of Karaoke competition - you gotta remember that people are sitting there thinking, "Do I really want to wait three hours to sing a four minute song? Three hours for four mintues? I can run down the street and get into that rotation."

It's very easy to make it a mathematical formula that people can understand. You can average-out songs at about 4:00 minutes each. That means that it will take about an hour and 45 minutes to play 25 songs. You make it policy that the first 25 songs will be played in the first rotation, if they get their slips in before 9:15. Any singers coming in after 9:15 will be slipped into the next rotation as a "new vocalist" and the "new vocalists" are inserted every other song.

With Hoster this is real easy to manage and the crowds respond extremely well. They see you are not playing favorites, they understand that it's up to them to get their slips in early, and if they do come in late, they can usually still sing their first song relatively quickly. New vocalists don't normally have to wait any longer to sing their first song than the 25th person in the first rotation had to wait to sing theirs. In fact it doesn't usually take that long.

By adhering to this rotation and being consistent, our crowds stay larger longer because people know that we're going to make sure we give everybody a fair chance to sing again. We don't simply keep taking new vocalists at the expense of the people who've been there from the start, but we're also not going to ignore the new vocalists. Two hours is maximum for a rotation. After that, you lose a lot of people. Unless you work in an area where the audience is constantly rotating in and out of the place all night, you can't hold a crowd with a show that 's not fair to everyone.

I've made it a point to travel the country and research Karaoke shows. I visited a Karaoke place on Bourbon Street in New Orleans (pre-Katrina) and was surprised to see how the audiences flowed in and out of the place all night. The method this place used was to have no more than 200 songs - all well know, upbeat stuff that anyone could sing and the audience could sing along with - and people would sing the same songs over and over all night long. The trick is - the audience was never the same from hour to hour. On Bourbon Street, people move up and down the street, popping into one club after another to see what's going on. The never stay in any one place too long. So these shows capitalize on how their audiences are constantly changing and they don't really have to worry about rotation and song selection, they just let the new group of people that flows in every half hour or so sing the same stuff as the previous group that just flowed out.

That worked well for New Orleans, but it won't work in a small town where there is only one place that does Karaoke. I have never seen a really busy Karaoke place in any small town I've visited. Perhaps it's because there's simply not enough people in the town, but usually it's because the Karaoke just isn't that good and there's no good alternative. Good vocalists would rather not sing at all then sing at a bad Karaoke show.

I work in an area where you have got to try to keep people in your place all night and we're contracted to do it 7 nights a week in this one club. That means we've got to try to encourage and maintain enough people to fill this club everynight, but not leave unhappy. It's a fine line and the tightrope can be walked, but it can only be done by clear, fair guidelines that allows the maximum number of songs to be sung by each person.

- Alan