Freeloaders had a part to play in that if your car breaks down in the middle of the desert, its the starvation that gets you but the lack of preparedness is really the thing that got you. Just as the restrictive business model of music sales nearly brought down the music industry with freeloader's help (with iTunes saving it), I feel as though karaoke song manufacturers have played a part in the woes currently befalling their businesses.

Ironically, while I used to be of the belief that buying digital songs was the way to go, I don't think it will be enough. By asking hosts (and patrons) to buy the songs they need results in only the most popular songs being bought in bulk. This means that while the latest Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars will sell well, the less known songs and artists will struggle and there will be a natural shift by manufacturers to hedge their bets and only produce songs that they think will sell well. This will, over time, lead to a homogeneity of lists which isn't good for anyone.

I hate the idea of subscriptions for personal music use, but it's a great idea for DJs because it means that your collection always has the latest songs and your monthly costs are fixed. This is why I think the karaoke industry should move towards a subscription model, allowing hosts to always have the latest songs and not blow their budget in the race for the biggest list. Having said that, there needs to be an alliance between manufacturers. If I was hosting and wanted to subscribe to a manufacturer, I'd go with Zoom or SBI but then I'd miss out on a lot of great tracks from SC and dare I say it, SF, not to mention all the Aussie stuff in Capital's database. You simply won't get a situation where hosts will subscribe to multiple databases so what's really needed is all those databases linked to one subscription. It's a pie in the sky idea, I know, but with manufacturers dropping like flies it seems as though something truly out of the box is needed.

To really hammer home the advantage, I think the more work they take off the host, the more attractive it will be. Best case scenario is a subscription ID linked to your player and you sync to the database server and the songs automatically download and are imported cleanly into your player. You can also, from your account page on the subscription website, download a csv file of the full list and/or that month's new songs or use tools on the website to build your own songlist (I still have a dream that one day you'll be able to easily build a 'genre' songlist).

Will this be enough? Who is the largest market for karaoke songs? I dare say that the market among singers is probably a bigger one compared to hosts so I would recommend the industry look at heavily targeting the karaoke singer as well. This is one of the things that Chartbuster was doing that impressed me. For a singer, while you could still have a monthly subscription model, I imagine you'll get much more bite from a casual plan where you login, pay for say, 3hrs and you have unlimited use of the database for that time.

The karaoke manufacturing industry needs to address the following concerns:

* They need to make buying songs easier and more convenient than downloading songs.
* They need to avoid a situation where only the most popular songs are made because only the most popular songs will be bought.
* Fixing the cost of use will make it more attractive to hosts that are looking to minimise their cost to income ratio.
* They need to reach out to non-traditional markets that will be more lucrative in the long-term.

I don't see how anything other than a subscription service ticks all these boxes.
Submitted by LeatherBaron on 25-04-2012

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