Karaoke Forums

Okay, here are my thoughts. I've got what I feel is a pretty respectable set as far as equipment goes. But do I have enough songs? Currently all I have is:
Chartbuster Essential
Chartbuster Essential 3
Supercore
and a few misc. disc from various vendors.
This gives me a little over 1,300 songs.
On one hand, I think that maybe this is enough to start out with, but on the other hand....well I'm just not sure, so that's why I'm coming to you guys once again.

Reason is, I've been ask to do some private parties and I just want to make sure before I commit that I'm properly prepared.

Any recommendations on additonal sets that I may want to get? Now I'm aware that many of you are loyal to Sound Choice and DK. From what I've gathered many of you built of your collection with the Brick series, is this the best way to go? Also I've learned by your comments series that I should stay away from. I've yet to read that many positive comments about Backstage and have seen mixed comments on Dangerous. I'm not even gonna get into the SGB debate again...

So what are some middle of the road series that are a bit more in the newbie budget.
Now I'm aware that I have brought this subject up in previous post. I just wanted to start with a clean slate that hadn't been overrun with too many negative comments.

Maybe what I'm trying to ask, is how did you start out, with what series and how many songs did you have when you went into the business.  
I respect any suggestions you may have, realizing that a lot of comments are personal preference. I would just like to keep it civil though, or at least to a low rumble.  
My apologies for anyone who thinks my questions may be repetitive from previous post, but I'm from the crawl, walk, run school of thought, and at this point I just wanna know if I'm ready to walk yet. Thanks in advance.

James
Maninblack

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I serve no man and am loyal to only one God.

Being critical of a person's success in any respect speaks volumes about the lack of your own.

Love as though you've never been hurt, Dance as though no one's watching, Sing as though God Himself were listening.

To quote Carl Sagan - the number of songs you should have to run a show?  "BILLIONS and BILLIONS!"

No, really - you can run a show with one of those sets you have.  If you are working only occasionally then I would suggest renting a system and library.  This assumes there is a company that does that in your location.  Our local karaoke store is also in the business of hosting shows and it rents gear to most of the independents in Calgary.

If you want to have your own discs then I suggest buying the two Foundations and all the Bricks.  THe greatest effort is to make sure you don't have a lot of duplicates on disks.

I personally started with the SGB set(half stinky/half pretty good).  I have added a lot of Canadian content.  My collection is now at about 300-320 CD+G plus 60+ Laser Discs with about half being SoundChoice Foundations, Bricks and individual Spotlight CD+G.

Unfortunately karaoke discs are like cocaine - the more you have the more you want.

Maybe we should consider starting Karaoke Anonymous

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Terryoke
Krazy Kanuck Karaokeist

Karaoke is the only social disease that you can get in public and not get arrested.

maninblack, I need to know the very same thing. I'm glad you posed this question again. I missed it the first time around.

I have a friend who KJed a private party once. His overhead was high because he had nothing to bring and had to rent everything, including the disks.

My wife and I currently have about 1000 songs including a few dupes. Since I am considering KJing myself I need to know exactly what you are asking.

14 years ago the only choice I had was Pioneer laser discs or DDKaraoke.    I have songs on a lot of different companies.   If it's the only version of a song, then that's the one you play.     I started out with about 1500 songs.   That cost me $6,000.    But that was the limit of what was available.    Now there are over 270,000 songs.   So starting a selection is going to be a bigger challenge now.  I never really thought about it, but I wouldn't want to start my selection over, right now.  Wow    And many of the companies have come and gone, so some of what I have, you may never get.     Check ads for KJs going out of business.    I bought an entire system with discs, used.   Look on the web sites for sales and specials.  What age group and musical taste group, do you want to cater to?     Do you think you have enough songs to play out with?   What kind of budget do you have for adding discs?    How fast do you want to add discs?    Is your selection current?   It took me 14 years to get 9,000 one of a kind songs.   15,000 altogether, with 6,000 duplicates.   Over $ 45,000.   Buy songs you like and what you hear at other shows.     Ask people what they like to sing.    They never seem to be at a lose for telling you, what songs they want.   Try to balance your selection between types of music.    But be practical.    You will only ever need one Irish disc and that can wait, no polkas.     You can probably do better buying discs with mixed artists, rather than single artist discs.    Unless they are real popular.   I'm talking about getting a varied selection, fast.   You can specialize later.

IMHO.  Quantity is not the key.  I started kjing in Jan 2001.  In the first year I had roughly 2,000 songs.  Mainly Sound Choice and Chartbusters.  I did not and do not carry but one version of any song.  I use the one that I feel is best.  It's now 2006 and I currently only have 9,600 songs.  Again, no duplicates.  
 
I would continually pay the little extra cost for Sound Choice and Chartbusters and let your collection grow slowly if need be and maintain the quality of those songs.    
 
I have a friend who has 20,000 songs.  A third of them dupes; and many of inferior versions.  
 
A 1,000 to 1,500 is fine to start IMO, as long as you add when you can, have a variety, and stay with  quality.

Kelly

You know, I never bothered to count how many songs bars actually have... however I would say out of 1300 songs I should be able to pick more than a few. (unless they are all metal or rap lmao)

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Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure. (I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear.)

Quality is the key.  So what if Joe Inferior has 100,000 songs if the majority of them are crap versions and off the wall songs that no one wants to sing in the first place.  A successful show CAN be run on 1,000 or less "well selected" songs, however consumer perception being the way it is do seem to judge by the size of your book.  The Sound Choice Foundations & Bricks are a great start.  I personally am not too fond of the Essentials myself - mainly in the pop/rock stuff, CB country is pretty top notch for the most part, but it is a start.  
If I were to give you a number figure for what anyone should have, I would probably say around 5,000 songs would be a respectable size book - but make sure they are 'quality' songs & not just a bunch of crap to make your book big! Don't buy what you think people want, get a request sheet out & get what your singer DO want!

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I love eBay.  I have actually kept up with every purchase I have made since I started.  Because of eBay and buying often used discs, I have 9,600 songs in my system and have actually only spent less than  $20,000.  I realize that is a small dollar amount (compared to many) but I have a lot of TIME invested in looking for deals and not reduplicating anymore than possible the same songs.  I found a couple kj's that were wanting to get out of the business and bought their collection for little money.  

I was lucky.  But this goes back to what I was saying about taking your time in buying and stay with quality.

And like Bigdog, I have many discs that Sound Choice no longer even produces.

Normally now, the only NEW discs that I currently buy are new releases.

Kelly

Maninblack, I have put forth the theory (and may actually test it someday) that I could run a successful show with the right 200 songs from my library.  You figure most 4 hour shows you will play about 60 songs.  

But I digress.

The number of songs you need to play is really dependant on the area you are working in. It's like that old saying, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."  If everyone in your area is working with about 1000 songs, then you should be just fine.  If everyone else is working from much larger libraries you should upgrade.  

More important (IMHO) are what I call the three commandments of karaoke hosting.

1.  Good song selection.  As folks here have telling you, it's QUALITY not quantity that counts. the other side to this coin is responsiveness.  If you've got loyal customers who are looking to sing something you don't have FIND IT AND GET IT!  This will endear you to their hearts and they will choose your show every time.

2.  Good sound.  Even if you aren't running top-of-the-line equipment, do whatever you can with whatever you've got to make your singers sound good.  Even when I first started out and was running cheap crappy equipment people would tell me that they like singing at my shows because they sound better than at other shows.  MASTER YOUR MIXER!  LOL

3.  A Fair and consistent rotation.  However you run it, Lord knows there are a lot of different ways, always run it fairly and always run it the same and people will keep coming back.  Sometimes at my shows the wait is 2 hours, but people realize that they will get their turn when they are supposed to and that nothing "fishy" is going to happen to the rotation.  Sometimess you're going to wind up feeling like an @sshole for sticking to it but your customers WILL appreciate it.

GOOD LUCK!

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Spreading the karaoke gospel

I'm just a home user but currently I have 107 CDGs, most are very good quality but of course there are some duplications of songs. I also have 2 super CDGs with over 1000 songs each...one rather sucks, but the other is really good. One of these day's I'll have to see how many songs I actually have...right now its over 4,000 but that includes duplicates...hmmmm now I'm curious. If I ever get ambitious I'll have to set up a database in my PC - right now I just have my books set up by CDG, and number the books and CDGs the same. This sounds like a good project for when the snow flies and I got a lot of time.

Jebus woman, you never told me you had THAT many  LMAO  and I thought *I* was bad!

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Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure. (I can't hear you. I have a banana in my ear.)

ditto to most of the posts here.  it doesn't matter if you have 10,000 unique songs if they are not songs folks want to sing!  i have roughly about 2000 unique songs, but i rarely get asked, "hey why don't you have so-and-so".  when that happens, i buy that so-and-so song the very first chance i get....unless of course it's some crap that will never get asked for again.  i frequently ask folks at my shows to submit a list of songs that are in current play on the radio as well.  i don't listen to much radio since i don't really have time.  my singers try to keep me updated on what's hot on playlists.  that's another element i use, by the way.  i go to radio station websites.  they usually have playlists linked on the site.

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All work and no play make Homer something something

We just typed our songs into MS Excell. Not trying to promote any software, it just was easier that way than trying to create a database.

I actually tracked what songs were sung over like a 3 month time frame (about 30 shows).  In that time frame there were 700 unique songs sung...
50% used only 1 or 2 times.
20% used 3-5 times
30% used 6+ times


So yes you could start a KJ business with 1,500 songs, but make sure to invest in GOOD songs.  I would also suggest subcribing to one of the monthy CDG offerings, that way you get the "new releases".

Yeah ATM thats what I have now...however I would like to set something up that I can do a cross reference... alphabetically, by artist, by genre etc. I'm a semi-computer geek anyway so when I have the time I like seeing what I can come up with..... I just got the whole MS office suite 2003 and need to play with it more....I just have to be in the right mood or it all flies out the window...darn ADHD .

My library is a mish mosh of everything bought every where.
I have bought on e-bay, aquired old Kjs sets, bought directly from
Sound Choice, bought a few from our neighborhood karaoke store and
even bought discs at Walmart. I have worked hard to work out all the dups.
I have 19,000 or so songs. I have spent way to much money, but tried to be
frugle along the way. My best buys were from KJs on e-bay who were selling off their libraries. I am proud to say a vast majority of my songs are sound choice.

I don't think you need this many songs to do a good job. Like most here have said
having 1500 - 4000 is excellent if you have the right songs. It is very frustrating and
time consuming putting together a library, but when it is done it's done. I can't tell you how many hours I sat in front of my computer trying decide what versions to keep, so I wouldn't have dups. I didn't want to spend the time to listen to everyone, so I went more by maker.

when people ask me how much it costs to have a setup like mine. I giggle because
they think it is all about the equipment - heck the discs are what will make you go broke.

I was so disheartened the other night when 2 of my regulars said they were going
somewhere else because the guy has 100,000 songs. They love me, but like this guys amount of songs. My head almost blew up. I said there is no way to do that unless he is buying illegally and I won't do that. I am current up to last year. What could he have that I don't. (dups and illegal down loads)
I told them to tell me what songs he had I didn't I would get them or they can buy what ever disc they want and I will play it. They just sat there. I'd rather be told it is the bar they don't like or the long wait to sing, but don't tell me it is my song list.
Arggggg!

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[shadow=pink][glow=deepskyblue]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[updown]~*~ MONKEY BUSINESS KARAOKE~*~ [/shadow][/updown][/glow]

This goes back to the old "I have 36,000 songs" nonsense--yeah, with 6 separate versions of HAPPY BIRTHDAY, and every title having 6 duplicated versions. Boil all that down and theres ACTUALLY maybe 6-7000 SEPARATE TITLES. Find LOTS of that around here---many CAVS machines with that kind of load out. Im up to about 470 discs now--somewhere around 6000 songs I think. All kinds of diffrent manufactures. So i dont buy the idea of GIGANTIC ASSORTMENTS. Do I have EVERYTHING? No. Is it neccessary? NO. Do I get compliments on my assortment?? Frequently. Ive tried to build it with as much variety as possible to make it as attractive as I can to the most people possible. And of course I will continue to add more SEPARATE Titles as I go.

And YES LONMAN DOES HAVE A KICK-AZZ ASSORTMENT!

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"You know that I sing the Blues and I do not suffer fools. When I'm on that silver mic, it's gonna cut ya, just like a knife"-The SWINGCAT

My collection leans more toward rock and I've got it through the ages right to current. However I do have something for everyone. I started with a couple of sets including an 18 disc set from Supercore, then I just kinda built from there. Once I discovered Sound Choice I went pretty nuts . Finding good rock CDGs now isn't all that easy though. I have been buying individual tracks and when I get enough I burn them to a CDG...thats been kinda kewl too as I get just what I want.

I believe I started with something like 1500 songs, and kept a clip board by my song books for people to write a song they wanted that I didn't have.  Worked really well for me.

And a set of disks that I would HIGHLY recommend, because I get TONS of use out of them is Chartbuster Party Pak 10 disc set (CBPT01).  

I personally like Chartbuster for rock from the 50's to the 80's, Sound Choice for harder rock, Star Disk for country.

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