Karaoke Forums

Amazon cloud goes down Friday night taking Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest with it.... what say ye cloud advocates? Would your venue have paid you last night?

Wouldn't have lost anything if you donwloaded the library to your computer. Since according to Ryan that can be done & you don't even need to be connected to the internet to use them.
But I did mention something similar in that regard before that the servers they use would have to be super computers & massive redundent backup systems. Because no server is infoulable & if several hundred kj's are using this one night & the thing glitches, ALL of those kj's are screwed if they are solely relying on it.

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

Not the first time this has happened with amazon and still their stock keeps going up, up up. Their price to earnings ratio is 187 which is OUTRAGEOUS compared with Apple-14.2, Microsoft-11.3, Oracle-15.3, IBM-14.58, Walmart-14.96 etc. this can't go on forever. Either amazon needs to start making some money or their stock valuation needs to go down drastically. I'm betting their stock will go down by more than 50%. The stock and the company are overvalued by 10 times. amzn is a $20 stock selling for $225. Seems very fishy to me. Can you say manipulation? If Apple had a 187 price to earnings ratio the company would be worth somewhere around $7.7 TRILLION dollars instead of $546 billion-currently the highest market capitalization of any company on the planet.

As Lonnie said, the way Digitrax presented it, anyone that had local copies would have been just fine.

-Chris

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-Chris

got to agree, $0 lost. it would all be on the drive already, not streaming. streaming is a different concept. logging on next month when you need to verify subscription and songs get taken off the drive because of licensing expiration is a different story too.

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

I'm not very comfortable with the concept of files "expiring". So you work an entire career as a KJ and the day you retire, you have nothing to show for it. The whole streaming slash encrypted time controlled file thing is fine for novice singers at home, but I don't ever see it being the norm for professional KJs.

Would you spend your entire KJ career renting your sound equipment? Hell no. Why would you do the same with your music? Heck, your equipment wears out over time, but an MP3+G will sound and look the same 100 years from now. Why wouldn't you want the songs forever? It's not like they'd take up room in your house. You could fit every karaoke song ever made on a 2 terabyte drive that nowadays isn't much bigger than a deck of cards.

The cloud is good for some things,, but renting your music? No thank you. I pride myself in the karaoke collection I've built over the years. I sure as hell ain't letting anyone take it away the day I retire and stop paying the monthly rental fees.

No, you have all the money you earned. You had use of tools to get the job done. If you rent an apartment, when you leave or die, you don't have an asset but you had a home. It's a choice, you don't want it, don't get it. It's that simple.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

Not if the manus have their way. Using your analogy, that would be like outlawing home ownership. Rent from them or be sued into oblivion.

Not quite!

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

Sorry but, if the manufacturers only make their library exclusive to the cloud, you have no other way to buy music. You don't have a choice. You either rent from them, or you're SOL. Trust me, they don't care about you and your little KJ business. It's all about corporate greed.

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Electro-Voice Evolve 50... Taking Sound To The Next Level.

Actually, at the summit it was stated that the download sites would still be around, just plastic is going away.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

Why are they casing it a cloud if the files reside on your hard drive, it can't be both. You're either streaming or you're not. If you're just downloading time-stamped digital files, then "cloud" is not the correct description. Chart buster and Compuhost were already doing it.

"Sorry but, if the manufacturers only make their library exclusive to the cloud, you have no other way to buy music. You don't have a choice."

Really, the last time I checked there are many, many discs available at retailers, E-Bay and the like. New music MAY not be available but as many have said before, not too much of the new stuff is sung.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

Renting your music is not inherently bad. We found out in the recent economic slump that home ownership is not inherently good, either. And, there are a lot of similarities between the two...

Home owners who bought homes in the early-mid 2000's paid far too much for them, as we found out when the so-called "bubble" burst in 2008. When the market was flooded with foreclosures, it drove down the price of just about every other home on the market. I am underwater in my home, realistically owing $20K more than what it would fetch on the market today.

Did you buy karaoke music prior to 2011? Did you not witness economic conditions deteriorate among the manufacturers? It drove some out of those manus out of business - and when they knew they were going out of business, they flooded the market with music in what turned out to be a last ditch cash-grab effort. Just like the housing market, those who purchased music are sitting on assets that are not worth near what they paid for them just a few years ago.

As you can see, renting music is not inherently bad - just like owning a home isn't inherently good, either.

I think it all comes down to cash flow - is it worthwhile to you (especially if you are just getting into the business) to lay out all that cash, or possibly pay interest on a loan for an asset that has no guarantee of a return on your investment, should you ever liquidate?

I've seen a few guys get into the business, spending a fortune on everything that they need - only to find out that the karaoke business isn't the cash cow they expected. My advice to anyone getting into the business is to not purchase music, if a deal like Digitrax were available.

It is expensive right now, but those prices won't last. I don't think anyone other than someone very desperate to get into the business would pay those prices. But someone with that type of desperation could probably find a hard drive of pirated music for the cost of 2 weeks of Digitrax service.

Digitrax was created to help stifle piracy by creating a "one-stop" source of the best karaoke music available. But, it isn't going to stifle piracy - those prices are going to fuel it. They'll realize it and you'll soon see the prices go down - whenever they finally do go live.

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I'm not a cheerleader, but I paid for my pom poms with my own money!

This is what I've been saying, the Cloud will only increase piracy, not eliminate it. You don't fight piracy by giving the shaft to your loyal customers who have supported you over the years by socking it to 'em with a "hefty mothly fee". This is not about piracy, this is not about the KJ, this is about making money for the manufacturers at our expense.

What bothers me the most about this whole thing is that you are NOT given a choice if you want music specifically from SC or CB. You must subscribe to the Karaoke Cloud to get it.

If I want to see a newly released movie, I can either rent it from Vudu or I can buy the DVD or Blu-Ray. I have that option to me. But with the Karaoke Cloud, these manufacturers are not offering you any other option. And that's why I will have no part of it.

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Electro-Voice Evolve 50... Taking Sound To The Next Level.

Then don't. As with most things in the free market place this will either flourish or die. I personally don't see this making any tracks (ya a pun). Established hosts with good sized legal libraries probably won't want it as there are other options, pirates won't care, and newbies, unless they have a number of established gigs, probably can't afford it.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

You can't force pirates to buy your product through lawsuits if there are no pirates to sue.

Pirate KJs are not typically loaded with money to pay out in big settlements. The price of this product has to be high enough to create an income stream that can be shared by the manufacturers yet low enough that a pirate can afford it as part of the lawsuit settlement instead of going out of business. Lawsuits are the sales tool intended to drive the sales of this product.

I believe this product was developed with one thing in mind, pirates that can't afford to make a large settlement payment and are letting their lawsuit go to an uncollectable default judgement. This way the pirate stays in business and is able to pay and keep paying. Everybody wins....except the legit KJ who already paid for his music and doesn't need anything more from those who are no longer producing.

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KNOW THYSELF

Ding, ding, ding, I think earthling has nailed it. Well thought out and logical way to look at it. Probably most pirates are broke and have no way to pay the judgements against them so SC and Pirate Recovery take it as an annuity. They eventually get paid, just not up front in one lump sum.

"CLOUD" computing, and karaoke, have nothing to do with streaming, per se. All cloud technology means is that most of the hardware and software is stored remotely instead of locally.

I use the Amazon MP3 cloud service all the time, and love it! If I'm out at a wedding, and I forgot some of my music, or get a request I wasn't expecting, I just connect to the cloud server and download my own files. Amazon even lets you store music that you didn't buy from them. ITunes is the same way, that is all cloud servers.

Anyway, there is no boogieman here. This is legitimate, vetted, viable, technology that is better what you are doing now. The only concern would be if DigiTrax makes this KJ friendly, but even if version 1.0 isn't, the wonderfully unforgiving capitalist free market will dictate that they WILL get it right sooner than later.

Patience, little ones!

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C Mc
KJ, FL

Exactly.