Karaoke Forums

I have no intention of stealing anything. But I am not going to bow down to a Fascist Karaoke vendor like SC who has a control issues. And I can't respect anyone who puts a Karaoke company above other people in their own field. It's just like all these politicians who are trying to take away the rights of workers and trying to kill the unions. They are wrong. It's the workers who count because they get the work done. Without them, there would be no businesses. Walmart would not have their billion dollar business without their employees, (just as an example). SC would have NOTHING without it's customers. They overcharged for their products for so long that potential customers started stealing music. They did nothing. NOW they want to sue everyone to recoup losses that they allowed in the first place. YOU and the rest of the cheerleaders are all bowing down to them like a bunch of sheep. You, in essence, are a scab. You side with the corporate entity instead of your fellow workers. I have always been a labor guy, myself. I respect labor. I respect workers. I respect the KJs who are fighting against your kind and SC.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

The "price" of stolen music when there is no enforcement is "free."

Where do you think SC should have set its prices, so that their "customers" would get a better deal than "free"?

Where was all of this enforcement when people were just burning their ill gotten gains onto CD-Rs? Wasn't it just as illegal? I know a bunch of KJs that used to copy each others libraries to expand each others collections. I knew of one guy who acted like a middle man for every KJ in the area. He was one of the first people around here that found out how to copy karaoke discs and he would copy a bunch of karaoke host's discs and give each one a copy of the other KJ's discs. This would give guys who had 5000 songs each, libraries of tens of thousands of songs. Is it just that much easier to catch them in todays world than it was back then? Or was it the fact that an investigator wouldn't get close enough to see if the disc was an original or a copy?..especially if they were running one of those old JVC machines that held the discs in some sort of cartridge?

There's a big difference between going into Wal-Mart or any other brick and mortar store and stealing and doing it through your computer. So I guess Smooth that you think people have the right to steal if prices are too high? Look, there's a Jag, but they priced it too high so that gives me the okay to steal it? Really. So your rights are more important than other people's rights or a company's rights. C'mon, I've dealt with criminals who come up with better excuses than that.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

They were no more overpriced than any of the other 'quality' manus. I remember when Music Maestro & Backstage (neither of which are quality) discs were $30 and SC was $28 at our local brick & mortar when they all started hitting the market. Hell I started in an age when discs cost me $150 each. THOSE were overpriced.
I was getting SC discs since around 2003 anywhere from $18-22 per disc depending on where I shopped, same as Chartbuster and Pop Hits Monthly (and those were only 9 songs at $18).

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

Which I NEVER usnderstood. I was made those same offers back in those days - still get them on occasion - to copy out & swap libraries, sad thing is, they didn't have anything I wanted, mine consisted of SC, CB, DK, PHM - of course they wanted those. No way I would want my competition to have what I spent my hard earned money on for free (or swap for their crap). I only had a library of maybe 3 or 4,000 songs at that time. When computers came out & the competition suddenly went from a few thousand to SEVERAL thousand, I was mad as hell, but that slowly waned as those companies now may have had the good libraries (complete), but their sound usually sucked (although they didn't think it sounded half bad) & they had no people/hosting skills. Unfortunately, they soured karaoke on many clubs around here at the same time driving down the prices.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

Had you lowered your prices to $15 a disc, or maybe started selling them at Walmart for $12 a disk you might have kept a much bigger customer base. Making SOME money is way better than making NO money. Would you still have thieves?? Of course. That is not something that will EVER go away. But selling your music at $25 a disk, when others were selling for less, and still others were stealing them outright, YOU are going to be the loser. Now you are chasing shadows. You will never win. SC will never be the company it was, and EVERY company that is still putting out music is pushing you further and further into irrelevance.

Your certification program is a joke. Maybe it has help some in the bigger cities, but in small town America the bar owners want cheap entertainment. I worked at one place one night. The patrons loved me. The owner loved me. She wanted me to come back every other Saturday night, but she only wanted to pay me $75 a night with a $25 bar tab. That is what she paid her old host. I told her it wasn't even loading my truck for that. I thought I was giving her a break at $125 after I quoted her $200. She still has no one hosting at her place.

I am sure what you will find in areas that have heard of the lawsuits, KJs will just remove SC from their rotations, and your inspectors will have nothing to see. I think, as time goes by, you will have more and more trouble getting settlements and selling GEM packs. Little by little, people will get wise and just use the brands that aren't protected and aren't enforced. Think about that, over time the hard drive sellers get wise and just don't load those drives with your product. Then YOU can't do anything to them. But you won't be making any money, either, because people still won't be buying SC. Believe what you want, but I think this is very possibly the way it could all go down. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

Well using your exact words - Making SOME money is way better than making NO money! Why not lower your prices like the others? Probably the same reason SC were a little higher than some - they felt they were better??? And pretty much correct in their assumptions - especially at the time they were higher.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

I never said that the high prices gave people the right to steal. BUT higher prices help facilitate that theft. There were plenty of KJs who WERE legal, buying their expensive disks and being good little doggies. Then someone said "pssst, come 'ere. Check this out. Visit this site and you can get all the songs you want for this nominal fee." BOOM, there goes your retail business. Now, if those prices had been lower, that same KJ may have said," Nah, I can afford to buy my music, so I will continue being a good doggie." Instead, at $25 a disk, those KJs who may have stayed on the straight and narrow said " Hell Yeah!! Thanks for the info!!!" Boom, a whole bunch of bad doggies!! Is it right? Nope. But it happens, and if things keep going this way, SC will have no recourse because the smart thieves will just shy away from SC, CB, and DTE.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

Well, if the place was around the corner from my house, then I might have taken it, at least until something better came along. But seeing as this place was about 15 miles north of me, $75 would not cover what I needed. BUT selling 120,000 units at $12 each, as opposed to selling 30,000 units at $25 each, I would rather have use the $12 price.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

Well they didn't come to my house, but they definitely sent me a legal letter - found through my IP address and sent to my physical address. So yes, record companies do in fact do this.[/quote]

for the ones you stole....yes
did they send you one for the CD's you ripped to your computer for fill in music?
if so, then it would be comparable.

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Paradigm Karaoke, The New Standard.......Shift Happens

Are there any new filings? It seems like the last page has turned into a pissing contest...

Smooth, what you may not know is when the karaoke companies get a licence, they can only get a licence to produce x number of discs, whatever it may be. As far as I recall, albums or CDs from the labels sold at near identical cost as karaoke renderings. You can go and say they should sell at x number of dollars but what is the cost to produce them? It isn't cheap when you have a full recording studio, full orchestras (including strings, piano, organs, etc), rent, wages, distribution, and a host of other costs. I love when people see that ABC Co has sales of $10,000,000 and they think that's what they made. People forget about taxes, expenses, fees, etc and the company may have made $1,000,000 if they're lucky. If the company is traded it may mean the stock went from $50.00 a share to $51.00 a share, depending on the number of shares there are. Everyone, including you, are looking to make a profit. A 10% (or use any other number you like) profit is the same whether you make $5,000 on sales of $50,000 or $1,000,000 from $10,000,000.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

Like I said, making SOME money is better than NO money. BTW, you may think 10% is 10% is 10%, but in the grand scheme 10% of $5,000 is $500 leaving you with $4,500, while 10% of 10, 000,000 is $1,000,000, leaving you with $9,000,000.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

The "price" of stolen music when there is no enforcement is "free."


Wow that really says it all

But what you aren't thinking about is what did it cost them to to make that? 10% of $5000 is $500 - provided they didn't spend close to the $5000 mark to make that. Having worked in the recording industry, it's not all candy. You often times spend alot more than what you anticipate making back, sometimes it becomes lucrative and you actually make a pretty penny, but if you are creating alot of product (like SC) some of the profits can become losses real quick with lack of sales from other discs.
Same goes with the $10,000,000. In relation, if they spent that to make that million back, it's all the same. I make a pretty good monthly wage, however almost 25% goes right back into the business, 25% goes to host wages, I end up making enough to pay my personal bills & eat - not much more.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

except every manu had their material in those compilations, they were all being stolen from, even playing field.



true, but also remember that stealing is not what did it. CB was put out of business from their own poor management practices, but still sold discs. PHM is still going and selling discs, SC has not been able to sell discs for three years now. Why? people still bought CB, people still buy PHM, something in the SC product was not worth people spending their money. i know i have said it before, the SC songs came out many months too late after we already had them on PHM, CB, or one of several other quality brands. they may be good renditions, but not worth $25.00 for the difference to replace them as the other manus improved greatly. the songs were put on discs loaded with 6 or more tracks that were on 5 other discs....how many copies of these songs do we as hosts really need? all manus have dupes on different discs, but i know i have more SC dupes of 3 or more than any other manu . THAT is what pushed the damage from piracy (which i agree has made an impact) over the edge to them not being able to produce discs while their competition can.
piracy has affected everybody, but to ignore the other issues and put the blame soley on piracy is rather short sighted. SC was the biggest selling manu, when 30,000 (for a number) people are downloading instead of buying, the lesser selling brands of CB and PHM should have gone away first, but they didn't. the one that sold the most went away and the lesser selling brands kept going. there were other factors involved, economics 101.

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Paradigm Karaoke, The New Standard.......Shift Happens

Personally I have always felt that their is no sure way to ever sort out the piracy issues concerning karaoke. The manus themselves have problems with some of the materials they produced over the years. No one has the morale high ground, some are just less dirty than others. As long as you use the material at home no one seems that concerned, because realistically you can't go house to house and search for contraband, it just isn't doable. A simple solution to me was just license everyone to run their karaoke business, the fees from the license could be paid into a central fund and distributed to the still viable manus. A different spin on this idea is the Cloud Service, but after listening to Gretchen it is apparent the only label they can sign you off on is CB. The rest of the labels are not under their legal control. The large volume of freeware status material means that you can totally boycott both SC and CB if the host chooses, and probably in the case of Smoothedge is the best alternative, since he doesn't want to jump through the hoops. Basically I have elected to do this with SC. What happens with my CB material is another matter, most of that library is on SCDG's 1-6 originally produced under license from CB by CAV's. I have about 2-3 years more to do hosting, then I'm done and will leave the industry to younger hosts. By that time over 20 years will have been spent doing gigs, in all that time I have seen no investigators, and only run into one host ever hassled by SC. When they found out he had na da dinero they dropped everything, and he is still playing today. So much for crushing the problem. Have a nice day.

It was, but I think I can answer your question 2 ways:

1) It simply wouldn't have been as profitable for SC. Yup, there used to be copied disc disc hosts out there, but only about a tenth (or less) of what has exploded when folks were dumb enough to use MP3s in a pro setting.

By this time most folks already had a PC. Add free (stolen, originally off of websites)MP3s a couple of powered speakers and a mic- Shazam! Instant KJ.

Add a crapped out economy since 2008, and you get a new business that could be started for dam near nothing.

Copied disc pirates still had to pay for the materials (discs), time, (remember how long it took to copy discs on those old Goldenhawk drives? Imagine copying a whole library that way) Labels- even white ones, or at least paper track listings, as well as the music itself. Copied disc pirates paid a lot less, but nowhere near as little as MP3 pirates do ( Either zero if downloaded, or a few hundred for a loaded drive).

With a zillion ACTUAL (track theif)pirates, SC merely had to scattershoot and wait for something to stick.

Also, in order to catch a disc pirate someone actually has to investigate ( in other words, come to a show and actually witness the useage).

Now, some dummy gets on a web page or FB and advertises 50-100K songs and SC has the letter out before you can hit "refresh".

2) When SC stopped producing, they came up with this"settlement" idea as a new source of income. Nobody thought of it before. Desparate times breed desparate measures.... Unfortunately, a few ( and by looking at their web page, I mean VERY few) KJs were easily intimidated, and this gave them the impetus to continue.


Just my opinion- your mileage may vary.

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."

DISCLAIMER: My answer is based on a hypothetical situation. SC already knows that I am OMD based, and have no reason to be audited. That being said:


When I walk out of Pizza Hut, I leave with something of value ( hypothetically speaking- I'm not a fan)- Pizza. I trade my money and very little time and effort in hopes of getting something tasty to eat. However, I AM trading TIME and money but the time I am trading is recreational, and not that which I sell for my business.

We simply have two points on which we seem to disagree:

1) Business time has VALUE. You don't seem to think so, hence the "free" claim.

2) More important. You perceive a value to the audit, where I do not.

This means I would be giving away valueable time for nothing ( per my perception).

Bazza, I really am glad that you run your business the way you wish, and that you are happy with it. I don't bash you or judge you.

Why not provide others the same courtesy?

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."