Karaoke Forums

karaokeking211

Couldn't agree more Topher. Do what works for you and your venue. If it is successful great, if not rethink your plan. The End!

A bar owner I worked with at one time DID have certain songs 'unavailable' on his digital jukebox. And I had to wait until he left for the night to play anything at all that even remotely resembled hip-hop.

The interesting thing about this topic is that often the people who stop going to a place, one or two at a time, don't really affect the bottom line until six months later and someone starts saying, "Hey, where is so-and-so lately? They haven't been in for a while." And pretty soon you end up talking about 5-6 groups of people...who are now happily situated somewhere else singing. It can be a gradual drain and sometimes you get people replacing them, sometimes not. All I'm suggesting here is that it isn't always obvious the impact certain changes will have on a place. It doesn't always happen that someone stands up and states loudly, "Well I hate this kind of music and won't listen to it anymore and I'm going somewhere else." They can just stop coming and find another venue that doesn't promote that kind of atmosphere. This is unlikely to happen when someone sings Bob Seger or Reba McEntire, and more likely to happen when someone sings "F@@K Her Gently" or "Closer."

That brings a question to mind. Do bars censor juke boxes ever? Just curious, considering most of the bars in the suburbs now have digital downloads, so you can get any song out there. I haven't seen an old school jukebox in a while now. Do they have some feature to censor

I get so mad at the bartenders sometimes. While i'm setting up these young girls start playing the young rap and wild music. The crowd is usually a mix but leaning toward the older side having dinner and drinks. These girls don't understand what they are doing. They are playing stuff they want to hear, but looking around it's not what everyone else wants to hear. So they are chasing away my potential crowd by it. I hate young bartenders that want to play the jukebox before my show starts. It's NOT dinner music. They think they are entertaining the crowd.

If we played all rap music at our venue we would have no one. The rare song doesn't scare anyone off but several might. However the bar next door plays mostly rap/hip hop/heavy metal and allows beat boxing and they have a crowd of 21 year olds that often outnumbers what we have. If any of them venture into our venue they are scared off quickly by all the George Jones.

So you never mentioned what is your age?
That's what a jukebox is for, if the club didn't want certain genres, they can request for these songs NOT to be available in their club. I have kids that I allow to play the jukebox if there is one available, they pick what they want to hear if it's in the jukebox! OH WELL to anyone else! Guess the club shouldn't have provided a jukebos with these songs available, even downloadable jukeboxes can be programmed to delete certain songs/genres!

I still think it is funny that posters on BOTH SIDES of this issue are posting with the tone that they are "right" and other shows are "wrong" in the way they handle things.

OF COURSE the answer to this issue is that you do what is best for the venue to bring in and keep the most people.

Karaoke is played in VFWs, gay bars, family restaurants, sportsbars, dance clubs, retirement homes, churches/youth groups, and the list goes on and on and on. That's what makes karaoke so popular, is that different styles of music can be incorporated to please pretty much any demographic.

So stop with the "we do it the right way at my show because...." BS. OF COURSE the rules are different at the retirement home in Iowa then at the gay bar in NYC. Don't be ridiculous and act like there is only one way to run a show!!

This includes these stupid debates on this board on filler music/censoring the book/system quality, etc.

There is nothing to debate here! The bottom line is that most everyone in here is right. If you have a steady karaoke gig, you are satisfying the demographic sitting in the seats, and whatever you are doing is RIGHT for your bar, even if it would be 180 degrees WRONG at the bar down the street.

I've always said that the fact that you care enough about your show to spend time on this board in the first place puts MOST people on this board in the top 10-15% of KJs in this country. It is the ones that don't care about their craft that ARE NOT on this board that you gotta worry about. Multi-riggers/pirates/undercutters and the type. Those are the shows that are not doing it the right way, not those of you who are argueing on this post/this board in general!

A lot of people don't know that Turn the Page was really written about a karaoke singer leafing back and forth through a song book that had too many versions of PBDL. The karaoke place is somewhere East of Omaha (a friend of mine actually went there once). Anyhow, all the eyes are upon this guy that is trying to pick out his song, but there are so many versions of the same song, he doesn't know which one to pick and he gets so mad that he just wants to explode. At the end of the song he describes himself lying awake in bed with the song still echoing in his mind and thinking about what the KJ told him about taking so long to pick a song and get up to the mic (like it was his fault or something)!

Turn the page...yep.