The Karaoke Quotient

While we’re not busy applying sociological analysis to Gossip Girl or discovering the Wagnerian myth behind Iron Man 2, the Overthinkers love to unwind with a rousing karaoke session. Not surprisingly, we take it pretty seriously. We make sure to bring new material to each session, we practice, and we perform with gusto in order to make the experience enjoyable not just from a personal, “I’m singing this song I love” perspective, but also from an entertainment, “I’m brining enjoyment to the people listening to me” perspective.

We think we’re pretty good at karaoke, but it’s only partly due to our abilities to carry a tune. The non-singing performative aspects (dancing, gesticulating, etc.) are important as well, but perhaps the single most important factor in our karaoke success is song selection. Anyone who’s ever been to karaoke knows that there are some songs that work great, and some that just bomb, no matter how talented the singer is. “Sweet Child ‘O Mine” is almost always a bad choice. “Bohemian Rhapsody” almost never fails to bring the house down.

We have an intuitive understanding of why some songs work and some don’t–too long, too repetitive, too hard to sing or rap–and that mostly serves us well. However, I wasn’t content with this. Surely there must be a way to advance beyond these vague ideas about karaoke song choice. If only there were some mathematical formula for determining karaoke song quality, then singers everywhere would have a consistent and reliable methodology for choosing songs well and avoiding the embarassment of stinking up the place with “Yellow Submarine.”

And you know what else we could do? We could find an answer to that most elusive question in karaoke studies:

“What is the best karaoke song of all time?”

Well, without boasting too much, I think I’ve cracked the code. Read on to discover the groundbreaking Karaoke Formula…

…But before we get to the formula itself, let’s ground ourselves with some basic guiding principals in karaoke song selection that drive this formula:

• The song should be popular for a typical audience. It’s so elementary, but it needs to be said. Most audiences, be they friends in a private room or strangers at a bar (more on that later), won’t enjoy your rendition of last year’s Filipino smash hit, no matter how awesome the song is or how well you sing it. They don’t know it, and they won’t be able to relate to, much less enjoy, your performance.
• The song shouldn’t be too long, nor should it have lengthy instrumental solos without any singing. This is what kills songs like “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Sweet Child ‘O Mine.” So what if it’s one of the greatest songs of all time. Karaoke is about live performance, and when it either goes on too long, or goes long stretches without any vocal performance, people start to lose interest. Note: air guitar-ing during guitar solos helps a little, but not enough to justify singing “Master of Puppets.”
• The song shouldn’t be too repetitive. See above notes on audience losing interest.

Now that we’ve gotten the more obvious things out of the way, here are some more subtle factors:

• The song shouldn’t be too difficult for a typical singer to hit all of the notes in the original key. Song difficulty comes in two forms. The first applies mostly to rap songs, but it involves being able to deliver the lyrical content in time with the song. This is what makes “Hypnotize” and “Under Pressure” very dangerous karaoke choices. The second is less for rap and more for those soaring ballads and screaming metal songs that kill singers with their range. Most men can’t hit those high notes in “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Bon Jovi himself can’t even do it these days (Ritchie Sambora does it instead). But note that I mentioned in the original key. Songs with high notes like “Livin’ on a Prayer” are often transposed down a step or two, which helps with singability, but kills in terms of remaining true to the feeling of the original song.
• The song should end strongly. Fade-outs are weak sauce. This is a basic of live music performance that becomes obvious only when prerecorded songs are presented in a live format. If a band is doing a live performance of a song that, in its recorded version, ends with a fade-out, the band will almost never play a fade out; instead, they’ll end strongly, with either a stinging single note, or a big, flourishing, rock finish. Ending a karaoke song with a fade out only saps the energy out of the room that you worked so hard to get there with all of your singing up to that point.
• The song shouldn’t be too repetitive. Those cheesy videos aren’t interesting to watch–people actually pay attention to the words in karaoke, and they’d better be good with not too much repetition, either within the song itself or at the end. Similar to the above point on song endings, repeating the chorus over and over and over again at the end of a song sends the energy level plummeting.
• The song should have a nostalgic quality to it. I can see this one being controversial and/or reflective of bias on my part, but hear me out on this. Newer songs, though they may be all over the airwaves/Waffles/interblogs, haven’t had time to fully disseminate into the body of commonly assumed pop music knowledge for the general public. This is closely related to the popularity point mentioned above, but not exactly the same. Older songs are not only more popular (read: well-known), but they also carry a sense of nostalgia that, when activated, causes the listener to enjoy a song not just for the song itself, but also for the old memories associated with that old song. This is simply impossible for newer songs to accomplish. Note, however, that the song can’t be too nostalgic. Elvis music is, for lack of a better way to describe it, just too old to get a typical karaoke audience excited.

OK. Now that we’ve gotten the basic principles out there, let’s look at the formula itself.

Is the representative from the Nobel committee here? Good. Let’s do this.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are witness to a groundbreaking moment in Karaoke Studies. I present the debut of the Karaoke Song Quality Formula, a method for determining the appropriateness of any given song for performance at karaoke bar or lounge. We measure this appropriateness through the score that is assigned to a song through this formula, which I hereby call the Karaoke Quotient.

Here’s the formula:

KQ = 1LD + 2SLR + 0.5AD + 0.5(RS/500) + 0.5(BH/100) + 1WPS + 0.5SF + 1(1/ER) + 2D + 1I

Where

KQ =  A song’s Karaoke Quotient. The theoretical maximum is 10.

And

LD = Length Differential. How much the song runs under or over the ideal length for a karaoke song. Songs that run shorter than ideal are penalized at half the rate of songs that run longer than the ideal.

SLR = Solo to Length Ratio. The total duration of all instrumental solos (not intros) during the song.

AD = Age Differential. How much the song’s age differs from the ideal age for maximum nostalgia effect.

RS = Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Song inverted rank. #1 on the list = 500, not on the list = 0.

BH = Billboard Hot 100 inverted rank. Peaking at #1 = 100, never charting = 0.

WPS = Unique word count in the lyrics per second. Unique words divided by total run time of the song.

SF = Strong Finish. If the song fades out, 0. If not, 1.

ER = Ending Repetitions. The number of times the chorus repeats itself at the end, inclusive of all choruses.

D = Difficulty. If the song is virtually impossible for a singer of the appropriate gender to sing, then 0. If it’s totally doable for a typical singer, then 1.

I = Intangible. If a song is, for lack of a better description, “just a damn good karaoke song,” then 1.

There are some key assumptions that drive this formula, and they’re certainly debatable, so they should be explained first before demonstrating the formula’s results:

• Weighting: Notice the 0.5, 1, and 2’s before each of the variables. This is how I’ve assigned more or less weight to certain song aspects based on how much they impact overall song quality. The rationale should be evident from the summary of concepts listed earlier, but to succinctly rationalize the 2 most heavily weighted variables: 1) long instrumental breaks create tons of dead space that kills a performance and 2) difficult songs are so often either bombed or unpleasantly screeched out, even by talented singers.
• Ideal length for a karaoke song: I tried, but I couldn’t find a commonly accepted “ideal song length” for pop songs, either inside or outside of the karaoke context. There’s a Wikipedia entry for the phrase “three minute pop song,” but no sources are cited. So without anything solid to rely on, I’m going out on a limb and declaring that ideally, karaoke songs should be four minutes in length. It’s long enough to cover a lot of musical and lyrical territory, but not so long so as to get boring or give the appearance of mic-hogging. (If you have an alternate suggestion, or better yet, can cite some sort of quantitative study around ideal song lengths, show me in the comments)
• Ideal age for a karaoke song: How do you measure the length of time that must pass before something enters the realm of the nostalgic? 22, according to VH1. That’s how many years passed between the year 1980 and the debut of the retrospective series, I Love The 80’s, in 2002. And that seems about right based on intuitive understandings of how cultural memory works: most songs get a few years in the spotlight, then fade in obscurity until the teenagers who grew up with those songs become broken middle-age adults reach back to their old music to recapture simpler times, thereby re-introducing those songs to contemporary listeners. (Likewise, I’m open to alternate suggestions on this; let me know in the comments.
• The Rolling Stone 500 & Billboard Hot 100 rankings: This is how we get at song popularity–and to some extent, artistic value. The Billboard Top 100 is a fairly straightforward measure of song popularity, but the RS 500 brings in some level of critical/artistic respectability to a song. I know, there are huge problems with the RS 500 list–believe me, I know–but I think it’s still useful to include in the formula.
• The intangible: This is my way of admitting that all of the objective measurements listed above can’t possibly cover all of those weird, unexplainable things that go into making any good pop song a great karaoke song. Some songs are just inherently better karaoke songs than others, and without fully being able why they are, I still feel like the formula needs to include this small measure of subjectivity and idiosyncrasy.

Okay, we’ve got the concepts, the formula, and the justification. Shall we see some results?

I got my hands on a “top requested songs” list during my last karaoke outing and ran the top eight songs through the formula. I also added a couple other karaoke favorits (“Piano Man,” “Sweet Caroline”) for good measure, plus the aforementioned “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as an example of the great song that is really bad for karaoke.

Now, the results for those 11 songs:

Now, I’m not saying that “Piano Man” is actually the best karaoke song of all time, but it is the song that came out the best among those that I had time to punch into the formula. Not surprisingly, “Sweet Child” was the worst.

I know you’re probably wondering what values I gave to all of these songs that resulted in their KQs, but rather than droning on about them in the article, I direct you to this Google Spreadsheet with all of the gory details.

But why stop at just perusing the data for these 11 songs? If you’re a Google Docs user, here’s how you can take it from here:

• Save your own version of this spreadsheet by going to File –> Make a Copy…
• Tweak the weighting factors at the top of the sheet (but make sure they all add up to 10)
• Tweak the values for ideal song length & age

Or if you’re happy with the formula as I’ve created it, add your own songs and help me find the best karaoke song in the world. Plug ’em into the formula and post the results in the comments. Bonus points if you field test them.

Lastly, in conclusion, even if you don’t tweak the spreadsheet or make your own formula calculations, please, do us all a favor and choose your karaoke songs wisely. The principles I outlined above shouldn’t be limited to a formula; they should go out into the world, into all of those seedy karaoke joints out there. Ideally a smoky room, with the smell of wine and cheap perfume, of course.