You’re just about to finish your insanely rocking performance of Paranoid. You’ve rocked everyone’s faces off with your perfect rendition of Ozzy at his peak, and the crowd is going nuts.
The venue is a stage, so you’re above the audience. It’s a real concert feel. You feel like you’re really in Black Sabbath.
Then, just as the song is about to end, a seemingly brilliant thought crosses your mind: stage dive.
A stage dive is a huge gamble in the karaoke world, and should only be used by truly expert singers who know when to take a calculated risk.
Why? Because a stage dive can only go two radically different ways: the audience will catch you, and you will crowdsurf your way into epic karaoke history, or you will fall on your face and likely injure your most ardent front-row fans in the process.
How to stage dive
1. Evaluate crowd density
For the audience to properly catch you, there must be a critical density of people. This can be difficult to evaluate, especially under the lights of a typical stage setup. While the front few rows of audience members may seem packed, a proper stage dive requires that the audience be really packed, and deep.
Remember, at any given time, you will have five or more people holding up your body weight, and odds are that most of them are regular people who are not used to holding human beings in the air. They will need all the help they can get.
2. Decide if it’s appropriate
Doing a stage dive is something that one does to celebrate a fantastic performance– if the crowd doesn’t think your performance was truly mind-blowing, they will see it as a facetious move. Make sure your crowd is truly rocked before you dive into their hands.
3. Use proper posture
Think of stage diving as the exact opposite of diving in the pool. When diving into a pool, your objective is to enter the water in as straight a line as possible, hitting the water with minimal force.
In the case of stage diving, the bottom of the pool is a grimy, gross, hard floor– and you don’t want to touch that with anything other than your feet.
You want to belly flop into the audience, so as many people as possible can catch you. This will increase the chances that people can properly hold you up and not get injured.
4. Give ample warning
While a surprise stage dive would be epic, your audience has to be ready to catch you. Use body language to make it clear that you intend to dive into the audience, and they should be ready to put their hands up and brace for impace.
5. Fall, don’t jump (unless you really know what you’re doing)
A stage dive is risky enough as it is. If you take a running leap into the audience, do so only if you really know what you’re doing. A first-time stage dive can simply be a controlled fall off the edge of the stage– it still achieves much of the effect of a wild stage dive, with far less risk.
The audience can’t catch you unless you make your self able to be caught.
6. Be prepared to get squeezed, groped, and robbed.
Again, your entire body weight will be held by the hands of strangers. They will touch you in places you’re not used to being touched by complete strangers in public. Anything in your pockets or on your person that isn’t locked down can fall our or be taken. If you anticipate a stage dive, empty your pockets in advance and get ready to be violated a little.
7. Don’t do it.
If it’s a close judgment call, err on the side of not doing it. A failed stage dive can kill an otherwise perfectly good performance. When you’re really ready to stage dive, however, you’re going to ignore this advice anyway 
It always helps to see other people stage diving in action, so make sure you’re comfortable with what you’re going to do before you do it. For the advanced karaoke singer, a stage dive is a great way to distinguish yourself as a truly special performer, because of the very risk that discourages the others.
So if you’re to stage dive, do so when you’re ready. And don’t fall on your face.
