David: I was going to reply to your last post in the Ask David Forum but thought it was of enough interest for a general discussion.

Re: Cut off times and when you as a host stop taking slips

My problem with any kind of cut off is the idea that just because there are 'enough requests' to take you through the night that you shouldn't take any more.

Hypothetical: You have 15 singers, each singing roughly 4 min songs and they've all put down 4 songs.

Now, in this situation, you have enough songs to take you through to the end but you wouldn't close the books because you simply can't justify one person singing 4 songs over one person even getting 1 in. Also, you don't know if those people will stay. So if you're willing to acknowledge that the balance lies somewhere away from that extreme, it becomes a matter of degrees; do you allow 15 new singers and the existing 15 only get 3 and cut off? 30 new singers and the existing 15 only get 2? And I think here is where most policies fall down, the policy itself is usually pretty rigid and doesn't allow for the ebb and flow that inevitably happens from night to night and throughout the night itself.

At the heart of the matter lies the question: what are your goals as a host; what are you trying to achieve and why? Answer those two questions and everything else falls into place. I know many many hosts who will baulk at introducing a new singer with 30 minutes to go or even an hour to go. That's fine, the line is always arbitrary, but this action signals that the goal of the host is to keep people who are already there happy (by aiming to give them an extra song), a sort of reward for being there all night. That's fine, but the trade off is disappointing someone new. A brand new customer, someone who may never have sung karaoke before, someone who may have come to your venue because they heard it was great, someone who may have moved into the area and is looking for a weekly haunt. You simply don't know. The question that really should be asked is: who is going to be more disappointed? The existing singer who doesn't get their 3rd or 4th song or the new person who doesn't get any at all? A lot of hosts say that everyone is aloud to sing but with a policy like this, its simply not the case.

Now granted, there are many many variables that make it very uncomfortable to introduce a new singer, such as an atrociously long rotation (I would be loathed to introduce a new singer who has been waiting 15 or 20 min into a last rotation that has gone on for 3 hours) but I wonder why a flat no seems to be the usual answer? You say no, they leave, you've lost them for the night and maybe even every week. I was at a show up north once where the response was 'We're really busy, I can't promise anything but I'll see what I can do'. None of the songs got up but at the end of the night, the host individually named each person who missed out on getting their song, read out what they had put down and said come back next week, you're at the front of the queue. The likelihood that those people would come back isn't a lock and its unlikely that the host would remember them let alone bump them up the list, but those people left the venue thinking that someone made an effort, went the extra mile. Those people talking to their friends are unlikely to grumble about how they missed out on a song and the word of mouth ball keeps rolling.

At the end of the day, you don't know where your next regular is going to come from.
Submitted by LeatherBaron on 10-11-2009

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