By Zhen-Kang —

It’s not karaoke, it’s KTV!

$15 for five hours of singing your lungs out…

A microphone resting on a wall mount, in a KTV room in Taiwan.
Get ready to rock (or in this case, explore some ’80s power ballads). Photo: Zhen-Kang.

In Taiwan there’s karaoke, and then there’s KTV.

Karaoke—which in Taiwan is pronounced kala-OK—is the kind of public singing you’re familiar with: people performing at a bar (or on stage), for better or for worse.

KTV, by comparison, is karaoke in a private room.

The name comes from late-’80s marketing efforts, back when this concept first came to Taiwan. The ‘TV’ part highlighted the fact you could sing to subtitled videos on a TV screen, which was exciting at the time.

And I can confirm after trying it myself, it’s still exciting in 2025.

Earlier this month, at 10:30 on a Wednesday night, I joined two others at Soaring Spirit KTV (神采飛揚KTV) in northern Kaohsiung.

For NT$300 (NZ$15) each, we got a discount on our first round of drinks and a private room for five hours.

I thought one or two hours would be enough, but the minimum booking was five.

As it turned out, we used almost all of that time…

The exterior of Soaring Spirit KTV (神采飛揚KTV) in northern Kaohsiung. The building looks like a two-story white church with a three-story belltower. Many scooters are parked outside.
On arrival, I noticed the Soaring Spirit KTV building looked like a church. I guess the name fits.
A curved corridor inside Soaring Spirit KTV (神采飛揚KTV) in northern Kaohsiung. There are a series of wooden doors labelled A-21 to A-23, each of which has a porthole window at eye height.
We were led down the corridor to one of these rooms with a porthole in the door. If the outside was a church, the inside was a cruise ship…
Interior of a private KTV room in Taiwan. A large red sofa wraps around three sides of the room, which is lit by disco ball lighting.
…And our private room was a disco.

While the others picked Chinese-language songs on the touchscreen controller, I started by inspecting the room:

A porthole in a door, above an emergency evacuation sign.
It was windowless (bar the porthole).
A small bathroom comprising a low western-style toilet and a hand basin.
There was a private bathroom off to one side.
A widescreen touchscreen controller for a KTV system in Taiwan. The screen is mounted on a side table and is perhaps 17 inches wide. The interface is in Traditional Chinese.
The touchscreen controller had options for songs in Mandarin (🇹🇼), Cantonese (🇭🇰), English (🇬🇧), and Japanese (🇯🇵). There were tens of thousands of tracks available, although perhaps fewer than 100 in English.
A disco ball mounted to a ceiling, next to a powerful airconditioner.
There was a disco ball on the ceiling.
A Japanese music video being projected onto a wall, with karaoke-style lyrics superimposed.
Music videos were projected onto one of the walls.
A complicated plastic-wrapped remote control on a coffee table amongst jugs of tea and paper cups.
In addition to queueing up songs on the touchscreen, we could use this remote to key in song codes from a reference book.

About an hour into the night, I realized we could also scan a QR code to add songs with our phones:

Screenshot of a web interface for choosing KTV (karaoke) songs. The song ‘Super Star’ (no artist name provided) is highlighted in red.
I forget whether the selected song, ‘Super Star’, was the Carpenters version—but it definitely wasn’t the Sonic Youth cover I’d hoped for.

About half the English songs were covers, including ‘Yellow Submarine’ by Emil Chau (周華健). I could tell some were covers by the typos in their names—for example, ‘Yellow Sobmarine’ by Tarcy Su (蘇慧倫):

Screenshot of a web interface for choosing KTV (karaoke) songs. One of the songs is ‘Yellow Sobmarine’ (sic).
‘Yellow Sobmarine’ isn’t as downbeat as its name suggests.

The sound system was excellent but the videos were hit-and-miss. One of the first we played had a suspicious “TAIWAN ONLY” watermark across the middle:

A music video being projected onto a wall in a private KTV room, with ‘TAIWAN ONLY’ superimposed on the screen.
TAIWAN ONLY.

Others had slow-motion stock footage of people or landscapes:

Stock footage of people waving, with the lyrics to Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ superimposed.
Welcome to the Hotel California.

But many of the music videos were authentic, including those from Taylor Swift:

Taylor Swift’s music video for ‘Love Story’ projected onto a wall in a private KTV room in Taiwan. Below the video, a pair of tambourines sit unused on a coffee table.
At the end of the night, three-and-a-half hours after Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’, we realized we’d forgotten to use the tambourines.

But tambourines or no tambourines, for me KTV was—unexpectedly—non-stop wholesome sing-your-lungs-out joy.

I was the only person there who couldn’t actually sing, but the others kindly tolerated my mangling of every available English track. (Although having said that, adding reverb and turning up the original vocals helped mitigate the damage.)

Aside from ‘Hotel California’ and some deep cuts from R.E.M., the selection was heavily skewed to 2000s pop and ’80s power ballads. Not my usual choices—but they were F.U.N.

A man enthusiastically singing a KTV song in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
A man enthusiastically singing a KTV song in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Two men singing a KTV song in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

I can’t comprehend it, but somehow we stayed there four-and-a-half hours—finally leaving at 3am.

I got a photo of the three of us outside as we left. I think we’ve never been so photogenic.

KTV is good for the soul.

Three happy men standing outside Soaring Spirit KTV in northern Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
KTV: It’s a love story, baby just say ‘yes’.
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Listening notes