Karaoke Forums

I never noticed it until last night. I was looking at all my newer discs and come about Spotlight 9001 I notice they are no longer produced in the USA. 8999 was made in USA at Charlotte, NC. Now they don't even say anything about being produced by Sound Choice. The info now is

Compiled & Produced By FSC-Mediaplas
PO Box 100, New Milton
Hants, BH257XQ
United Kingdom

Along with the logo of MCPS.

Could explain alot of things going on with them lately, I heard something about a merger with another company last year, wonder if this has anything to with anything from that.
I would have posted over there & asked them, but reading their forum lately it doesn't seem as anyone from SC reads or responds anymore.

_________________
[shadow=deepskyblue]I'm impressed, I've never met such a small mind inside such a big head before.[/shadow]

It makes sense.

The UK laws are a whole lot friendlier to karaoke makers than the US laws.

For the US the royalty has to be negotiated individually for each song to each songwriter. Some songwriters may be difficult to find, greedy or reluctant to approve a karaoke version.

Tracking down the song owners and all the negotiation has got to be difficult. Especially for tracks that may not be expected to be big sellers as karaoke. For major artists with active management it may be easier to get approval but the indie music done off of major labels, or one hit wonders may be much more difficult to do for US karaoke makers legally.

In the UK there is a set rate and a central collecting agency that handles all of the royalties, the same way it is in the USA for doing a cover version of a song. In other words they dont have to find the song writer, negotiate and get the approval.

Unless the laws change expect more karaoke makers to move overseas.

One very good possible outcome of this is that many of the contracts that were done in the us were for set number of copies of songs. This means that they could not re-issue disks or desirable songs, if the contracts could not be re-negotiated (or were more trouble to do so than it was worth).

If we are lucky they may be able to re-issue some of their out of print songs using the UK royalty laws, possibly as downloads/custom disks. This is important because there are a lot of hard to find songs that Sound Choice stopped selling, even on their custom disks.

MCPS
http://www.mcps-prs-alliance.co.uk/musi ... s/KAR.aspx


The UK royalty agency charges for karaoke:
12% of the disk price or 3.60 pounds minimum per disk.

At current rates thats $6.23, with a maxium of 30 tracks per disk.

It looks a little unclear on how they handle downloadable tracks for karaoke but it sounds "reasonable" price wise.

In the US the rate is 9.1 cents per song for the backing track (per song under 5 minutes) plus the "sync" rights that involve the onscreen lyrics and that has to be individually negotiated with the songwriter.

Apparently due to the difficulty in getting approval, and the costs involved for the
"sync" rights (lawyers, contracts), apparently Soundchoice thought it was easier to pay just the one fee at about 42 cents a song, if they stay with 15 song discs.

this was a nobrainer once SC had a serious problem getting rights to songs years ago. We BEGGED them to go overseas! !

Hopefully they'll stay in the game!

That's probably the same logic behind Pop Hits Monthly discs being put out by Sing It Now. Whatever it takes to keep the newer songs coming out is fine by me.

I think we need a karaoke lobby in the U.S. This is just another example of the U.S. government's over-regulation of industry that hurts our economy. It also hurts the ability for American businesses to stay here.