Karaoke Night vs a Singalong Paint and Sip

Picture ten of you at a karaoke bar on a Friday. Somewhere around the third song, the shape of the evening has already set. Two of your friends are up there living their absolute best life, a third is queueing with a song she has clearly rehearsed in the car, and the other seven of you are on a banquette holding drinks and clapping in the right places.

Nobody is having a bad time. Everyone will say it was great, and they will mean it. But if you are the one who booked it, you might notice something that nags a bit on the drive home: seven people came out and watched three people have a night.

That is the whole comparison in one image. Both formats put music in the room. Only one of them puts every single person inside it.

What karaoke is genuinely brilliant at

Let us get this bit out of the way honestly, because a comparison that trashes the other option is not a comparison, it is an advertisement, and you can smell one from a mile off.

Karaoke is fantastic. It is one of the great cheap joys of an Australian night out, and there are groups it fits better than anything else on earth.

It is brilliant when your people are performers. If half your group has been waiting since 2009 for a licensed excuse to do Total Eclipse of the Heart in full, do not take that away from them. It is brilliant for a small, tight crew of four or six, where the audience is only your closest friends and the queue moves fast enough that everyone gets three or four goes. It is brilliant late, after the actual dinner, when the night wants somewhere loud to land.

And it is brilliant for one specific thing nothing else does: giving a person a spotlight they secretly want. There is a friend in most groups who is genuinely, quietly magnificent, and karaoke is the only night out that hands her a microphone and makes the room look at her. That moment is real, and it is lovely.

So this is not karaoke versus us. We literally offer karaoke, more on that shortly. This is about knowing which shape of night suits the ten people you are actually inviting.

The real difference: who has to perform

Everything else follows from this one thing, so it is worth sitting with.

Karaoke is a solo performance in front of a room. There is a queue, there is a running order, there is a screen, and there is a spotlight. Even in the friendliest bar with the kindest friends, the format is structurally the same as an audition. One person up, everybody else watching.

Which means karaoke sorts a group into two teams within about twenty minutes: the ones who will get up, and the ones who will not. That sorting is not about talent, and it is not about confidence in the general sense either. Plenty of women who run entire departments will not sing in front of eleven people. It is a very particular kind of brave, and it is not evenly distributed.

A singalong has no queue. No running order, no screen, no spotlight, and crucially no audience, because there is nobody left over to be one. Everybody is singing at the same time, and everybody has a paintbrush in one hand and a drink near the other. Your hands are busy, your eyes are on a canvas, and your voice is one of sixty in a room.

Nobody is being watched. So nobody has to be brave.

That is the argument. If you take one thing from this whole post, take that. Karaoke asks for courage before it gives you a good time. A singalong gives you the good time first and never asks.

Five honest differences, drawn out properly

1. Knowing the words, versus knowing the song

Karaoke runs on lyrics scrolling up a screen. That is a reading task, and it is a strangely stressful one, because you are two lines behind before the first chorus and now you are performing and proofreading at the same time.

A singalong runs on songs the room already knows by heart. Nobody is reading anything. You know the words to Dancing Queen the way you know your own phone number, without ever deciding to learn it, and so does the woman next to you, and so does her mum. That is a different kind of knowing, and it needs no screen, no cue and no warm up. The first four notes go on and forty people arrive at the chorus together with no rehearsal at all.

2. In karaoke the quiet ones stay quiet

Watch the back of the room at a karaoke night. The friend who described herself as tone deaf in the car park is still on the banquette at 11pm, still smiling, still not singing. She never intended to. The format gave her an easy way to opt out and she took it, and she was right to, because the alternative was a solo.

Put that same woman in a room where everyone is singing at once and something different happens, and it is not bravery, it is maths. Nobody can pick out any one voice. There is no risk to manage, because there is no chance of being heard on her own. So she joins in, usually starting somewhere around the second chorus and somewhere around half volume, and by the third song she is not thinking about it at all.

That is the point people miss about the singalong format. It is not for people who like singing. It is for people who do not.

3. Karaoke has dead air. A singalong has none

Between every karaoke song there is a gap. Someone is scrolling the tablet, someone else is arguing that they definitely put their song in, the mic makes that noise, and the room drops into an odd flat silence that a group of ten then has to fill with conversation for ninety seconds before the next one starts.

Those gaps add up. Over three hours you have collected a fair few of them, and they are the moments where the energy leaks out of a night and people start looking at their phones.

At a Paint Juicy session the music runs the whole way through. There is no gap because there is no changeover, and the deliberate breaks are trivia moments dropped in between layers while the paint dries. So the room goes from singing to shouting answers at each other about which year that song came out, then straight back into the next one. The energy never has to be rebuilt because it is never put down.

4. One night gives you a video. The other gives you a canvas

Someone always films the karaoke. It goes in the chat at 1am, it is genuinely funny for about four days, and then it lives on a phone forever waiting for a moment nobody asked for. Occasionally it is glorious. Occasionally it is a hostage situation.

Three hours of painting hands you something else entirely: a finished canvas you made with your own hands, which goes on a wall in your hallway. Guests are usually a bit stunned by their own, which is the good kind of surprise. It is also a slightly odd sales pitch for an entertainment business, and we are fine with that. You came for a night out and you leave holding proof of it.

5. The two nights get judged on completely different things

A karaoke night is judged on whether the confident people were entertaining. If the three singers were on form, it was a great night. If they were flat, or the queue was long, or somebody hogged the mic, it was fine. The evening's success sits with a handful of people, and they did not sign up for that responsibility.

A singalong is judged on one thing: whether the room was loud. Nobody leaves reviewing anyone's voice, because nobody heard anyone's voice. They heard the room. That takes the pressure off every individual in it and puts it on the format instead, which is exactly where it belongs.

You can have both, and here is how

Here is the part where an honest comparison has to do the honest thing, so we will say it plainly: karaoke is available as an add-on at Paint Juicy private bookings.

We are not picking a side. We sell both, and the reason we sell both is that they do different jobs, and the strongest version of a big night often uses them in sequence rather than choosing.

The shape that tends to work: three hours of painting with the singalong running through it, everyone warm and loud and well past caring how they sound, and then karaoke afterwards for whoever wants it. By that point the two people who would never have got up at 8pm have been singing for hours and the microphone stops looking like a test. Order matters more than you would think.

Themes to build it around depend on your crowd. An ABBA Night is the safest bet ever devised for a mixed-age room, because there is no Australian woman between 30 and 90 who does not know every word. The 80s and 90s Singalong is the one for a group who all went to school together. Aussie Rock suits a crowd who want to shout rather than harmonise, and Movie Magic works when the ages in the room span forty years and you need common ground.

How to pick, in about thirty seconds

Forget the formats for a moment and think about the guest list. The right answer falls out of who is coming, not what sounds fun on paper.

Two more things worth weighing. If your group includes people who do not drink, the singalong format is far kinder, because there is something to do with your hands and nobody needs three wines to participate, which is the same reason it turns up in our guide to birthday party ideas for non-drinkers. And if the night has a guest of honour, think about where you want her: karaoke puts her in a queue like everybody else, while a painting session lets the room orbit her without her having to perform, which is why it works so well for hens parties.

For a straight-up night out with your people, both belong on the shortlist, and our wider run-through of girls night out ideas puts them next to everything else worth booking. If you have already decided you want the room to yourselves, the private parties page has the pricing, the themes and the add-on list in one place.

Karaoke vs singalong FAQ

Is a singalong paint and sip better than karaoke?

Neither is better, they suit different groups. Karaoke is a solo performance with a queue and a spotlight, so it rewards a small crew who all want a turn. A singalong has everyone singing at once with no queue and no audience, so it suits a bigger, mixed group where some people would never get up alone. Pick based on who is coming.

Do you have to sing at a paint and sip?

No. There is no microphone passed around and nobody is ever put on the spot. The music runs the whole way through and people join in when they feel like it, which for most people is somewhere around the second chorus. You can paint quietly all night and still have a great time.

Can you get karaoke at a Paint Juicy party?

Yes. Karaoke is an add-on at private bookings, alongside tarot mini-readings, photo wall props and a photographer. A lot of groups run the painting session with the singalong first and bring karaoke in afterwards, once everyone is warmed up and the microphone has stopped looking intimidating.

What if nobody in the group can sing?

That is close to ideal for a singalong. Because everyone sings at the same time, no individual voice can be picked out of the room, so being good at it is irrelevant. The songs are ones people already know by heart, so there is nothing to learn and nothing to read off a screen.

How much does a singalong paint and sip cost?

Public sessions are $59 AUD a head and bottomless sessions are $99 AUD a head, which are strictly 18+. Private bookings are $700 AUD flat for the first 10 guests, then $65 AUD per additional guest, with a minimum of 10 paid seats. Sessions run 3 hours.

Book the karaoke if your people want the microphone. Book the singalong if you want to look around the room at hour two and see every single person you invited with their mouth open, mid chorus, holding a paintbrush.

Trent & James