Karaoke Forums

Hi guys... Happy New Year!

I have a question, that may not have a straight answer. For 2005 I aspire to get my first paying gigs. I've done 4 free gigs at friend's homes, to practice setup and because my songbook is still small.

The question is: How many songs are necessary??? I'm at the 1200 song mark, including duplicates... I don't think that I'm going to try getting a gig until I get up to about 2000 songs. Your thoughts will be appreciated.

Thanks,

_________________
Frank
Pelican in Flight KJ/DJ
Miami, Florida

Ah the famous "How many is enough " question. There is no right answer for this. It's not all about how many, it's about WHAT you have. I see companies advertising over 15K songs & i'll look through their book & be disappointed because they list & COUNT their duplicates - some of the songs would have 5 or more listings for the same song, but over half had at least 2 listings for each song.
Another question would be, what kind of clientelle? If you have a crowd that is into mostly rock but your books are primarily country, that won't work too well.
I would start out with a good solid "CORE" set like the Foundations & Bricks. This will give a good start with about 1,500 non-duplicated songs. Then you can fill out the last few years with the Pop Hits Monthly catalog from about 2000 on - I believe that is around the time that the Foundation 2 came out.
I started a second system with this exact set & am now over 3,500 non duplicated songs, but I bought requests from the customers in the clubs I was working, so it was tailored specifically for them. If someone new walked in & asked for a song I don't have, I would GUARANTEE (as long as it is available on karaoke) that I would have it the next time they came in. When I moved to another club, I started buying for them & so on. You have 1200 songs - counting the dups, what is the quality of the selections? This is also another factor to look at. If you are running a Sweet Georgia Brown as your core & your nearest competitor is running all the "quality" discs, you may want to reconsider your core.
You can run a show successfully with 1,000 WELL CHOSEN songs, but it is very rare. Don't just buy songs & cheap discs to build your book up, look at other shows & write down what people are singing & get those songs. This will give you a better idea of what people want.

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

As a karaoke singer - not a KJ - I echo Lonman's words!

There's a guy around my area that a lot of bars like to get "because he has thousands more songs than anyone else" -- yep he does at that.

BUT - his thousands of songs are "thousands" of years old too =)

He hardly has any newer music, except for a few disks of guy's newer songs like some Toby Keith and the "Long Black Train" guy. But no Gretchen Wilson, hardly any Faith Hill, hardly any Martina, no newer pop stuff.

The one that kinda gets me is that he doesn't seem to understand that he should be buying music that the crowd wants to sing or hear - not necessarily just those that HE wants to sing. Cuz if that's the case then he can stay at home and sing 'em and we can play the jukebox =)

JUST A "HUMBLE" SINGER'S POINT OF VIEW

If you have 1,000 seperate songs, you're ready to roll. Too much is never enough. As noted if you get a good foundation series and a solid collection of standards (not standards as a category but standards as Karaoke standards) you're in business. You can build from there. I have seen places also that advertise 10K songs, 7K songs but they are tons of duplicates and large chunks of what is in their collection is NuTech quality, or WORSE. I know some folks will go 1K not enough, no way, but you can build. Go to the Bada Lounge on a Tuesday night in Seattle. It is PACKED, the rotation is 20 plus, and I don't even think they have 500 songs. I'd take it a step further and guess they are pulling off of the starter Super CD-G that came with their CAVS player. One night I was in there and just happened to have one of my systems from a weekend gig in the truck, so I grabbed the portfolio (I have 3.5K total, about 2.75K chaffing out dups) and they were floored. Let the KJ pull from my collection, but only toted in one song book - kept it up with her. At the end of the night she was begging me to come back in with the collection - but the point is she had a great show going with a great rotation and a packed club with a small, but very focused collection, regardless of having 500 to 750 songs unique.

The sooner you start doing paid gigs, the sooner you can start getting an ROI and re-investing into your collection.

_________________
Despite the internet rumor, Karaoke is not Japanese for "drunk buffoon with microphone."  However, "rotation," is Japanese for wait your damn turn!

For some reason, that really cracked me up

Here's a somewhat different spin on "how many is enough": In the case of this one KJ company, I believe it is possible that they have TOO MUCH. I can easily say there is nothing that they don't have. However, the problem is that they have too many discs. Since they own their own karaoke store, they get all the latest discs sent to them in duplicate, and a copy of all get added to their own personal collection. So bearing that in mind, imagine having to update your books all the time.

Their "solution" to this is to bring sets of their collection. Each set of discs has it's own book ranging from about 500 discs. The place where they have karaoke on a nightly basis, you'll never know *which* set they're bringing that night. So let's say you go there one night and you see they have song X by Artist such-and-such in the book. Then, come a few nights later, you go back and look through the book only to discover it's another set entirely that DOESN'T have the song you wanted.

I find that quite frustrating and have mentioned it to them before. Of course they explain they just have too many sets of books and disc cases to bring every night and don't want to have to deal with setting out 5,000 different song books and then thumb through umpteen million different disc cases. And while I understand that concept, I still think it's a bit irritating to play the guessing game each time you go to their venue. It's almost like you have to bring your OWN discs just to ensure you'll have a song you want to sing.

_________________

So the moral of the story is.......
Listen to the customer -- find out what songs they are lookin for or at least what style they are lookin for and have those songs and go from there.

Geez - with that in mind you could realistically go into business with as few as 500 songs I think. Provided they are in the genre of the customers' interests or at least semi-cover it.

It's funny that a lot of people complain that big businesses have forgotten about what it is the people want and just make decisions based on what they want without thinkin about how it affects customers. But it's not just big business that does that -- it's a lot of businesses - little and small.

That's ridiculous. They either need to bring in everything, stay with the best "set", or weed out the duplicate titles of everything & figure out which discs can stay behind because chances are, there would be a few hundred that wouldn't be needed at all.

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

I completely agree. However, one of the two KJs usually sings quite a bit during the evening when there aren't that many people lined up, and I think she may bring along the books with the stuff she's thinking about doing that evening. She probably doesn't get that many complaints about the selection, but since I am familiar with the way they do things with the books... I DO know they have more than what's there. I honestly think it would take them months to weed everything out.

_________________

We started ealier this year with about 1200 non dup song. And one of the thing we have done is placed a clipboard that people can request songs. I explain that I will do my best to get the songs they request. But since we are still working on our foundation music selection it may be a while until we get it. We are real close to paying off our system off and I will add about a 1000 more songs in the next few months. Our foundation is made up of chartbuster, our area is more country so we can get away with that. My plans are to overlay our foundation with Sound Choice seeing that they do produce better quality rock then chartbuster.

Probably their best course of action (and you might even suggest they do this, Deb, is to create ONE small 'core' book with the most popular songs (perhaps take requests for what songs should be included) and bring that book with them to every gig. Then, they have the freedom of offering different additional books at each gig (without running the risk of leaving behind the songs everyone expects.

I firmly believe that I could put together a "MENU" of about 250 songs and run most of my shows off of that list. One of these days I'm going to actually try it!

The other thing that no one else has mentioned is you have to take into consideration the karaoke climate in your area. By that, I mean what are the other KJ's in your area carrying. If all of the other KJ's are in the same boat as you are, then you should be fine.

I don't understand KJ's that list all duplicates and then claim to have THOUSANDS more songs than they really have. Personally, I think they're overcompensating for something!

_________________
Spreading the karaoke gospel

Ya crack me up!

Just a little point that seems to be forgotten regarding duplicates of songs... I do have a VERY large collection, and a lot are duplicates, even triplicates... Now, some may wonder why. The answer is that i have Chartbuster, SoundChoice and Sunfly in my collection. And they are NOT the same backings, though they are the same songs! And my customers REALLY appreciate this... Believe it or not, but a lot of my customers wants to try different versions of the same song to find THEIR favourite!

_________________
[stream]There is not such things as impossible...impossible just takes a little more time and effort![/stream]

That is perfectly acceptable to LIST the duplicates. This thread really isn't about listing duplicates or not, HOWEVER, I understand reasonings behind it. I personally choose not to & MY customers appreciate this - they know as I have stated in the books if they don't like a version, there's a good chance I have other versions & to just ask. What ISN'T acceptable is for a company to advertise "WE HAVE 15,000 SONGS" when they are counting the duplicate listings. That's false advertising & a flat out lie - more & more singers are becoming aware of this & know if you are stating that many songs, chances are - a good majority are duplicated (or triplecated or more). If you state something like we have 8,000 "non duplicated" song titles, that is actually a more impressive figure.

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

How many songs does it take? Depends on the crowd, the bar, and your rules. I've been to one bar that I could come in with 5-6 custom discs and not have a complaint all night - they all sing the same songs every week and it's always a small selection of country music. At the shows I do I have people from all over the world (ok, eastern Europe, all over the states) and a wide variety of ages (from 18 to 70 or so). This requires a larger variety of music to draw in and keep a crowd. Something I learned is that if you have the basics covered you can always add more as they request it.

BTW, I have about 3700 songs across at least 6 manufacturers - nearly 3600 of them are NOT duplicated and I get very few requests for additional music. When buying compilations watch for lots of duplicates since it drives up the cost per song.

What I bought:
10-12 discs at Wal-Mart/Fred Meyer/small Asian karaoke shop locally
15 VCD set off eBay
Foundations 1 & 2
Sweet Georgia Brown 1-66 set
15-20 Sound Choice discs
8-10 'other' discs

I'm still buying 3-4 discs a month and will continue to do so until the season starts up again and then I'll probably go to 5-10 discs a month or more. I figure by the end of the season I'll be close to 5000 non-duplicated tracks which should cover 90% of the requests and it will only be the 'latest' stuff I'll get requests for.

Remember - you will almost always get requsts for 'classics'. Paradise by the dashboard light, love shack, and summer nights will always be karaoek favorites. Same goes for Sinatra, Elvis and a few other artists. These are the staples that always get sung... Mambo #5 won't get played every week. Buy the staples first and then pick up the 'other' stuff...

Triplicates? Gads man, on the Sweet Georgia Brown Collection We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions/God Bless America appears ELEVEN TIMES!

_________________
Despite the internet rumor, Karaoke is not Japanese for "drunk buffoon with microphone."  However, "rotation," is Japanese for wait your damn turn!

Yep... but I only list it once... and it's never been sung.

Besides, I always thought that was a mistake on only my version of the set... guess it's like that for everyone.... I'm guessing disc 23 on your set is worthless too?

Max--there was a time when I listed all the different versions of songs in my books, and it did more to confuse my customers than it helped them. Now I have a master book, which lists all versions of all songs just in case I get a super savvy customer who wants the barnicle version of love me two times. Otherwise I just listen to the dupes, find what I think is the best sounding track and list that one in the books. Never had a complaint so far!

knock wood.

_________________
Spreading the karaoke gospel

I started with the KJ Powerized tool set. 200 of the most requested songs. That lasted me a few weeks. Now I'm up to over 10,000. Stick with those foundations,bricks and the old DK and Pioneer. Easy on the new stuff, make sure it has legs before purchase. I would reccommend the new Ashlee simpson song its called " Why are they booing so loud daddy "

As many have stated , you need to start with at least one good core set
SOUNDCHOICE FOUNDATIONS & BRICKS OR DK MILLENIUM OR SOME OTHER "STARTER SETS". Then if you pick up some of the "best of years" type compilations to get you caught up with the last few years you should be all set. Although more songs doesn't mean a better KJ , first impressions are important. If you start at a venue with a little skimpy book some people would perceive you not to be as good as "the other" guy with a big book and more selections. At the end its quality of selections, quality of DISC more than quantity of either. Whether you have 1000 songs or 10,000 songs ..a well made and presented book
goes a long way