It would be interesting to hear more of the non-standard ideas from the past, and how they fared - whilst they may not be right for today, it's great to bring previous knowledge in as a basis to new ideas.

Karaoke in its present form is great. Generally good equipment and hosting, and we get to sing for free, plus the songlists of 1000 of 5-10 years ago are now replaced by 10,000+. So why change it? If it doesn't keep moving forward, it goes backwards in a constantly developing world. W2S fixes the problem of finding karaoke, but to some extent masks the real situation of karaoke being far from ubiquitous.

The audience is the key, as singers are already in place.

For karaoke to be karaoke, it needs to be a place where any singer can drop in to a rotation and sing. Replace singers with hosts, give singers more than a song each, run competitions, and frankly you no longer have karaoke in the way its generally perceived - and, I think, lose the interest factor of whether the next singer will fly or crash and burn.

But within the standard of rotating singers from the pool of any attending, there should be some way to move karaoke to a more mainstream entertainment medium, and one that could significantly expand the market and provide great opportunities for today's hosts - and singers.

Some hosts, like China in Victoria, have played around with karaoke concepts for some time. Dave from Vegas Karaoke in Victoria used to have quite a wardrobe as props for his shows. But perhaps there's a limit to how much more entertaining singers can be made to appear, and that with today's adequate range of great singers and wide choice of music, the major advance in karaoke lies elsewhere.

We see that it's the involvement, or social, characteristic of karaoke that attracts and binds singers - viz: the typical karaoke person is a lone wolf finding his pack amongst kindred spirits at karaoke. If it's true that the variances that control where audience groups go for their entertainment make it unreasonable for karaoke to attract them, is there a significant market in non-singing lone wolves who, bound together into an audience and attracted and held by very much the same factors that bind karaoke singers, could provide at least a viable target karaoke for karaoke shows?

If this is the case, then we have already defined the audience target market - not to exclude any other, such as groups of hens, local older couples etc. - but a target market is a prerequisite for target marketing.
Submitted by David on 14-07-2011

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