It has been noticed lately that several of the companies (notably Sound Choice) are not producing as much new Karaoke as in the past.
After looking into the legal maze of regulations covering Karaoke in the US it would appear that to make a legit Karaoke version (in the USA) requires one to negotiate a individual agreement and rate structure with the person/company that owns the song rights. This is for the Sync rights, anyone can make a cover version of a song without prior approval, so long as they pay a fee of $0.091 per song per copy.
Since song rights are distributed among hundreds of companies, it is unlikely that it is going to be worth a companies time to produce a oddball karaoke song. According to one source the standard is a $1000 up front fee per song, plus some negotiated rate for each copy made of the song. If the "market" for a song is only in the low hundreds, at most the "small scale" karaoke distributor can never make ends meet. Only when planning to sell thousands of copies can this fee be overcome.
http://phillykaraoke.com/print.php?sid=32
On the other hand laws in the UK seem much more reasonable
Not only is there a standard rate about $6 a disk (with no initial fee), it appears that all of the fees only need to be paid to a central clearing house (MCPS) and not hundreds of different publishers as in the USA.
http://www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk/musi ... s/KAR.aspx
Prior cearance is needed to use the "artist/writer" name on the disk advertising/package name, but for a very small scale project (personalized) it seems that might possibly be avoided. Even so it would appear that the owner of the song rights only needs to be "notified" 28 days in advance of sales. For a small "custom" run it may be possible to not use the artist's name. This maybe leads to the complaints some of us have on our "burn" disks not having the artists name listed only song titles. Since most of my custom burns have been from Sunfly or Zoom, that may be the cause.
Based on the way the laws are written, I am not too surprised that UK companies such as Zoom, Sunfly, SBI and STTW are producing some current music including specialty interests, while in the US companies are either limiting their production to major hits that can be sold in mass or are flaunting the laws (Panorama).
Not only are the UK fees standardized and centralized, they have reciprocal agreements with organizations in other countries such that you can pay royalties for songs written/performed by US artists the MCPS agency. Only problem is that the products have to be made and sold (initially) in the UK.
Reading through the regulations it would appear that one can make a fully legal karaoke run of 100 disks for about $600 in the UK. By contrast in the US that fee would be at least about $15,000+ (with 15 songs/disk). For a run of a single custom disk of 15 songs, the UK fee would be $6 but the same $15,000+ in the USA.
What this means is that US karaoke products are going to be "mass" appeal only. It is not worth the time of the manu unless they know they can sell 3000 disks or more. At least it makes sense now why all of the cool karaoke songs come from the UK.
Despite the money that can be made from making karaoke, it is small change to the music industry, especially a major artist. Those major artists have set the rules in the US that make "indie" karaoke impractical. Fortunately it appears not to be the case in the UK.
If the US laws were like the UK model, I suspect there would be a huge boom of dozens of new karaoke manus in the USA.
It would then even be practical (and legal) for an individual to hire a local cover band to help them make their personal (but obscure) karaoke favorite. At the rates a cover band might charge, it may be worth it to an individual to pay $200 to get the karaoke song of their dreams. A reasonable group of studio musicians would probably do it at that price. As it stands the legal cost of making such a song in the USA would be a thousand of dollars or more.
There are many amateur (but decent) bands in the US that are able to make music tracks that can be used in karaoke, for $100 or so. Many such bands may view it as a good source of income, especially when they are just getting started and paying off the credit cards on their equipment. If the legal maze of making karaoke was simplified in the USA, such activity would be a great source of income to small garage bands. Some of the bands may be doing cover versions of the songs already, and would not even need to learn the music. I personally know of a dozen or so local bands that do cover songs that are as good or better than the standard currently in karaoke. Most of such cover bands can't regularly draw 100 people to one of their gigs. Decent recording gear is now low price.
Another industry that the US legal system is driving overseas.
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