Karaoke Forums

Well, cloud storage has been hacked ( as per stupid celebs that store things like nude selfies there and their lawsuits against those who have hacked and released them) , digital downloads hacked per the proliferation of piracy.

I would guess that the profit margin on stolen product would be even thinner than that which is at least purchased on hard media of some sort.

Like I said, downloads may be convenient and cost effective for KJs, but it does squat for the businesses that are trying to make money from it.

The original model of selling the same file over and over without new production costs sounded too good to be true for the producers - and it was.

There's just no way to protect downloaded tracks.

Same for cloud storage. I don't imagine that a cloud based karaoke service is any more secure than the others which have been hacked, and probably has been as well.

I agree with you about the thin margin, which is why I also expect music costs to rise dramatically.

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

" Disc based and loving it..."

Your point? Websites have been hacked. Credit cards have have been copied at gas stations. Banks have been robbed! And yes...CD'S HAVE BEEN COPIED. (GASP!) There is no perfect system...for anything.



Downloads are convenient for all party's...but you. In fact I would say that iTunes has proven that the easier and more affordable you make it, the more people will use it. The record companies laughed and said they would NEVER make any money at .99 a cut and they would continue to thrive. We see who won THAT game!

I fail to understand why you believe that digital delivery equals more piracy then hard obsolete media. Especially when practically every hard CD ever made is available via Torrent or Usenet at this moment.



Yup. And no way to protect a CD. The answer? Stop trying. The average consumer could spend an hour trying to find the latest hit single on Usenet or a Torrent. And they would do it if it cost $19.99! But it doesnt. It costs less than a dollar, so it simply isn't worth their time to steal, so they spend the money. It's convenient and affordable. Those two words are what the Karaoke industry needs.

bingo!!
and the industry has proven that.
don't hear many people talking about the new DISC they bought, but we hear all about the new SONG they bought. even on here, look at the KJ's, very little talk about the DISC they bought (unless it is an OOP disc found on e-bay or in a bulk buy from a retiring host) but we see all over "i have bought XXX new songs this year...".

The music industry is all but done with physical media. Beyonce released her album "Beyonce" on digital download only, no physical media at all and no promotion, just one day it appeared on itunes and....

"Ten days after its release, Beyoncé had sold 991,000 copies in the US, making it the best-selling album by a female artist in 2013, In its fourth week, sales reached 1.43 million, surpassing the total sales of Beyoncé's previous album, 4 which was released in 2011 and had sold 1.39 million in total in the two years since its release."
"Apple announced that Beyoncé was the fastest selling album in the history of the iTunes Store, both in the US and worldwide. It sold 828,773 digital copies worldwide in its first three days, and topped the iTunes Store charts in 104 countries. Six days after its release, the album had sold one million digital copies on iTunes Stores worldwide."
"According to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), in the last 19 days of 2013, the album sold 2.3 million units worldwide. As of November 2014, Beyoncé has sold 5 million copies worldwide."

what do people want? it sure ain't physical media. the industry is on board and making money from it, the consumers are on board and paying for it.
i don't see how anyone can see physical media as being the savior of the industry, that thought is being disproved daily.

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

Let me explain a little more in depth.

The future of ALL digital media from software to movies to audio is - streaming. You have to be connected to the provider to get access. Sure, stuff can be captured, but just making the switch to all streaming will force a sea change in the industry just like the loss of CD's and growth of MP3+G did.

"Ownership" is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. As Internet providers ramp up speed, reliability, and availability, users are rapidly switching from buying ANY from of physical media to renting and streaming.

Read the article I dropped in earlier. Also, go back a couple years on the forums to the predictions I made around physical media. Less predictions and more evangelism because I accepted that paradigm 10+ years ago. I was an early adopter and the mass public has now gotten hold of it and it is transforming the industry.

Digitrax and Tricerasoft are the only karaoke companies that offer streaming services for commercial use. My hope is that they will encourage other providers out there to look into doing the same thing. The faster I can move from buying any karaoke music at all to paying a monthly subscription ***at a reasonable price*** the better ($99/mo per system for KaraokeCloudPro is not reasonable to me....try about 1/2 of that - Tricerasoft is right on with their $34.99/mo per system price but their player is horrible.)

What we need is more partnerships between karaoke software player companies and Digitrax and Tricerasoft.

_________________
-Chris

I know that you are my personal forum troll, but there is nothing to argue about, and you look silly in the process.

Download/cloud: Nothing but lost income to the producers- Easy theft as proven continually. Since this is true and happens MOST OF THE TIME, this is a NO -MONEY MAKER for the publishers who lay out the money in hopes of a profit. Continual loss puts them out of business - another music source gone.

Hard media- of any sort- offers at least SOME protection, be it disc, card, or flash drive, enough at least to delay piracy long enough to make a few bucks.

Argue as any forum troll will, these are facts.

As for your assertion that I have a preference, keep in mind that BOTH types of media will probably be MP3. Nothing there for me either way, as previously posted and apparently not comprehended by you.

You would make a much more intelligent sounding post if you actually read AND COMPREHENDED that to which you reply.

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

" Disc based and loving it..."

Never has anyone so resolutely defended indefensible ground. You are surely the Creed Bratton of Karaoke Forum.

_________________
[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I'm not the one looking silly here my friend. Keep living in your antique fantasy world.

Your statements prove you don't even understand the concept of "The Cloud". You speak of it as if its some singular entity. Its not. It's a technological concept that can be implemented thousands of ways. It would be akin to saying "The Cable" has no channels I like. Therefor "The Cable" is horribly flawed and will never be successful, as if its the actual cables fault. But keep on digging your hole.

To your point: EVERY SC CD+G DISC can be downloaded on a Torrent. Right now. You claim these obsolete plastic discs protect them...somehow. Obviously, the media they chose had ZERO bearing on piracy. You DO see this...right? (BTW: A "Torrent" is a peer-to-peer file sharing system. The #1 way files of all kinds are pirated today.) For you to claim that one form of media is somehow piracy resistant is just plain silly (especially 30 year old obsolete technology). PHM pressed your fabled hard discs up until a few months ago and with HOURS they were ripped and available on Usenet and as Torrents. Pirates call this a "Zero Day Release" and it happened every, single time.

You gleefully call yourself a Luddite who shuns technology. Your posts prove you don't understand it, yet you continue to staunchly make wild claims about how it all works. Claims that are so easily proven wrong it comical. You should stop trying.

Call me names if it makes you feel better (names you don't even understand the definition of! ), but as long as you keep posting this silly BS, I'll keep responding.

I'm not sure Allan Ludden knew much about computers..

Is that why people are called Luddites?

Interestingly enough, there are a number of tracks that have been released as MP3+G Only that are **NOT** on the iRC and Torrent sites, yet the ripped versions from CD+G are.

Why? Because no one bothers to pirate the Karaoke Version version of Sinatra's "My Way" because there are already umpteen billion other versions out there (not a real example as I don't want to highlight the tracks I know of)

So it could be said that a cloud based provider could (at least in the short term) avoid being pirated by creating new versions of old standards. Then of course they have to figure out how to sell something that everyone already has a version of.

No STATIC content is safe from piracy regardless of what form it is delivered in. Even movies released to theaters get Zero Day Cam releases from people recording the movies with cameras in the theaters then uploading the cam captures to Torrents.

Streaming services would at least require you to be connected via an authorized account to be able to stream the content. After that the content can be captured and pirated easily enough.

There is no easy fix and no medium is more protected than the other.

But to Joe's point, I would have to actually steal his discs to then make copies of them, or figure out a way of clandestinely making copies without his knowledge. Where as any one of my 9 karaoke hosts could make a copy of my content in a couple hours, perhaps even while running my shows for me.

Everything Joe has on disc is already on mIRC or Torrent. The same cannot be said though about some of my digital purchases.

_________________
-Chris

My problem is with the increasing trend towards the nobody owns anything - pay me for life or you have nothing - software model. You pay and pay and pay forever and at the end of the day have nothing tangible in value to show for it. It opens the door for ever greater collusion and extortion on the part of all the suppliers as you either pay to update or you have absolutely nothing. At least with owned software, you have the option of staying with what you currently have if you do not or cannot pay the extortion fees.

Look at your software licenses. In many if not most cases, you are buying a license to use the software, not the software itself. That license that can be revoked at will by the software producer.

Having grown up in a time where ownership was the defacto means of consuming audio and video, I have struggled with the renting piece of it. But when I take the emotional attachment to "stuff" away and look at it from a money perspective, it just makes sense.

I can buy a license to use Office 2013 which I can then use on a PC forever. Except that Office 2016 will come out and I will probably want to upgrade to that and probably on a better PC as well. Or O can subscribe to Office 365 which lets me install a copy locally as well as access online version from anywhere, anytime, from any device. It will also get upgraded automatically for me when the new version comes out so i don't have to plunk don't a large payment just to get the new stuff.

I can spend thousands of dollars up front for my karaoke library on disc that I own (and there are advantages to this), or I can pay $35/mo (Tricerasoft pricing) for access to more than what I would have bought up front. There are pros and cons for both depending on your needs.

_________________
-Chris

When only the top people "own" and the bottom people only "rent," it does put us at the mercy of their price structure which could change. There is a growing list of artists who are refusing to stream their work and I'm pretty sure they aren't trying to put the genie back into the bottle. More likely they want more money for it which could make the $35 model obsolete.

It seems a bit early to base running a karaoke business on it. At the moment I can let people sing "Friends In Low Places" all they want but if I was streaming it would be a no go. Or maybe they could sing it one week and then Garth gets upset and pulls it the next. Or maybe the subscription price doubles because artists negotiated new agreements. Or maybe some artists make a deal with one company but not another so you end up buying more than one subscription in order to get the songs people want and it isn't cost effective for what karaoke salaries are these days. I could see how it might be a nice fill in for those new hits that come and go that you don't need to own. But at the moment I wouldn't want to put all of my eggs in that basket.

Really? I thought my posts were a clear and succinct defense, given the facts. Ah well.....

Next thread.......

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

" Disc based and loving it..."

Same goes with music, you never actually 'own' anything except for the format/delivery method (be it lp, cd, tape, mp3, etc) in which it was originally produced for playback only. The music itself is not 'yours' to do with as you please.

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

The "Nothing to show for it" angle makes sense if you are talking about Real Estate or a Classic Car. But we are talking about karaoke music, not some rare family heirloom you will hand down to your kids. Do you "Pay & Pay & Pay"? Yes. And in the end you STILL shelled out much less then buying it all, just for the ego stroke of "ownership".

Plenty of people "owned" hundreds or thousands of movies on VHS. What are they worth today? -ZERO-. Do the kids want them? Nope, they are collecting dust in the basement. Today you can subscribe to Netflix and watch whatever you want, whenever you want. You don't HAVE to own all those movies. Its FAR cheaper to subscribe. The same thing is already happening to CD's including Karaoke CD's. It really is depression era thinking and one that doesnt make good business sense today.

Baz - If that's your thinking then Please send me all your worthless cdg disks!

I wouldn't mind a pay for only what I use or a rent to own model but just the like the cable companies, the impetus in an online karaoke stream service would be "We give you the instant availability of 200,000 items and we have to charge you for the large catalog size. Never mind that you will never ever play the 80,000 filipino and vietnamese tracks, we still factor those in when we decide what to gouge . . . . er charge you for our service.

And they would find some way to make it mandatory to run their sponsored ads at your shows if you wanted to receive a discount-gouge price as opposed to the the regular-gouge price.

Classic drug marketing at work here. Get everyone hooked at a low intro price and then once you are the only game in town make them bleed.

There is no perfect model for karaoke music delivery. CD+G seems like an great thing except for all the awesome music that has never been released on CD+G and the fact that basically no one makes them any longer.

Streaming is cheap and easy except for the No Fly list and the track you played yesterday is missing today. The same thing somewhat applies to buying downloads except they can't take away what you paid for and downloaded.

We all have to face the facts that the CD's we have today are pretty much all we will ever have. ABSOLUTELY NO ONE will be returning to mass producing CD+G's in the future. Downloads or Streaming is where the music will be delivered (just as it already is).

_________________
-Chris

the problem i see with this idea though is that you are wrong, you can not watch whatever you want.
i can watch "Speed", "Terminator", "Hang 'em High", "E.T.", "A Christmas Carol", "Cinderella", "Gladiator", "Traffic", "Castaway", "X-Men", "Lord Of The Rings", "Shrek", "Training Day", "Moulin Rouge!", "The Bourne Identity", "Spider Man", "Snakes On A Plane", "Pirates of The Caribbean", "Sin City"...
basically pick any of the top movies of the last 15 years and most of the classics and you can not watch them on Netflix or Hulu Plus. you must buy the disc itself.
the same has happened for karaoke. anyone on the cloud streaming can no longer let their singers do "Friends in Low Places", "Purple Rain", "Jungle Love", "Rolling In The Deep", "25 or 6 to 4", "wanted Dead or Alive", "Wicked Game", "Money For Nothing", "Faithfully", "Don't Stop Believin", "Ain't Goin Down", etc...
basically a big chunk of the standards done everywhere you must own the disc. and it was just taken one day, no warning, just suddenly "sorry i don't have it anymore". in THIS scenario, ownership IS the better way. the singers from the cloud based show will now come to me because they can sing the songs they want at MY show.

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

But this is ultimately what smooth was saying, in this case, unscrupulous people may just resort to piracy to fill their holes they no longer have instead of simply not having them anymore.

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

They aren't worthless today, but dropping rapidly. They WILL be worthless in under a decade. Then all you will have "to show" for all your money & ownership are obsolete pieces of plastic. Are you going to KJ until you are 90? One day you will get out and the investment you thought you had wont be worth anything. Just like my GEM set, I'll continue to license it for less until I no longer need it. Meanwhile the guy who paid triple for ownership will try to sell them and find no takers.

Like this guy: http://tinyurl.com/lrpt8ow
You think he'll get any bidders? He has over $30,000 of useless plastic "to show for it". I wonder if he still likes ownership? This is the future of your old CD+G's. A sad man trying to recoup a sliver of his initial investment...and getting no takers.

But we are getting off track. The FUTURE isn't in more CD's. Quite the opposite.