Bastiat wrote:
What surprises me is that anyone would think that using a track whose sound recording has been altered and rerecorded and used in any situation other than home use is in any way shape or form legal. What amazes me even more however is that Lacey Thompson hasn't been sued by a major label yet. He's been doing this for many years, as far back as I can remember with his little classified ads in Musician, and Mix, etc. going back to at least the early 80s.
In any event I highly doubt that any engineer/producer would pan vocal tracks in such a way so as to make it more difficult for "vocal eliminators" to do their thing. There are new techniques that trend all the time and one technique in particular currently in use by many top engineers is to stack the vocals. This is done by taking the vocal track and panning it 45 degrees to one side, then copying that track and delaying it approximately 15 ms and panning that track 45 degrees to the opposite side, all the while EQing the opposite track differently as they're being stacked. I've used this technique myself and depending on a number of variables, have stacked vocals as many as 4 times for a lead vocal. Many times more of course for chorused vocals, etc. I can well imagine that recording lead vocals using this one technique would play havoc with a "vocal eliminator".
The main reason that the reverb tracks remain in the recording is because reverb tracks are almost never panned straight up and down and are often times EQ'd differently as well.
By most estimates; 90% of all KJs are pirates. These pirates have hundreds of thousands of karaoke tracks on their hard drives but you think that they are above using a track that has had the vocals reduced? That's almost as funny as asking the murder suspect to swear to tell the truth "so help me God". He has no issue with murder for hire but he would NEVER tell a lie.