Karaoke Forums

so if indeed they were selling unliscensed karaoke to us hosts and then turn around and sue us for running unliscensed karaoke they sold to us, isn't that entrapment?

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It's all good!

No, but it IS pretty slimy!!

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

Like I said, I don't think anyone is going anywhere. Same principals of CB involved with Digitrax, same tracks for sale, a promise of more music to come- in practicality, Chartbuster under a different name. No worries..

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."

Don't you think SC is doing that very thing? They produced a large amount of unlicensed tracks.

No, it's not entrapment, but it sure throws a monkey wrench into their case- Hence, no court battles after- what- 4 years?

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."

Exactly Joe. They had the switch planned for some time. They have been talking about a forthcoming "monumental announcement". It seems this just threw a wrench into the plan as evidenced by the Invicion email I recieved an hour ago.



My guess? I predict the KJ Media Pro drive will return under the DigiTrax name and have more than just CH songs. They are aiming to be the Karaoke iTunes.

I'm guessing Compuhost will get the HDMP back on track in time, however am willing to bet that it won't have a lot of CB songs on it anymore.
Although for those that HAVE backed up their drive, everything on it should still be available once credits are available again - unless they change their key to unlock - previously locked songs & NONE of the CB songs will be unlockable.

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

...."Fight piracy"....."Do the Right Thing"......"Show Us Your Discs"....."Get Certified"....and pay for it over and over and over....."by the way, Thank You for your business!"

...."It's all the same, only the NAMES will change"

....This WHOLE ENTIRE PROCESS is outta control!

yep, yep, yep....

....But just the cost of doing business, right? Just keep showing and paying over and over and over. Oh wait, another hoop to jump through and a new song to dance to....I thought this was whole campaign was supposed to help legit KJ's not confuse us?

New to the site.

To echo what others have said, it seems to be a bit of piracy mixed with some legal ineptness on CB's part that has led down this road.

In 5 years it'll be something else... a fee for rights to the cloud or some such. meanwhile, those of us in the trenches will keep on keeping on.

Welcome Terioke1....you have a good attitude.....keep on keepin' on


Bright Blessings
Athena

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"Integrity is choosing your thoughts, words and actions based on your principles and values rather than for your personal gain."
Unknown
"if a man has integrity, nothing else matters, If a man has no integrity, nothing else matters."
Lee McGuffey

I transferred all my credits from my online bank. I have 293 left to use, should tide me over until they get things up again.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

Worthless? A bit exaggerated perhaps. Price of song downloads continues to go up per track on Amazon, Itunes. Disc ownership for now seems to be the only 'legal' form of ownership. The future is not written. The music quality and the ability to easily transfer tracks from disc to digital form via MP3G etc will help retain disc value unlike the cassettes and other previous media forms that deteriorated with use, time, and media shift.

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-Kona

Amazon and iTunes can't be used commercially (as in by KJ's for a public show).

The trend for ALL music, movie, video is toward on demand and cloud storage. You expressed yourself exactly why the demise of physical media is rapidly approaching - "The music quality" is high enough that most can't tell a difference at even 128kbps and very few can tell a difference at 320kbps. "the ability to easily transfer tracks from disc to digital form via MP3G" - you should have just said "the ability to easily transfer tracks via MP3G". Sound Choice, Chartbuster, PHM, all ship tracks pre-ripped and even the legal download sites ship them pre-ripped.

But I suppose the best example is to just inventory your own music and movie collection and tally up how much you have bought in the last 5 years vs the 5 years prior. I will buy you a donut (a good one too), if you have bought MORE music and movies on physical media in the last 5 years than in the previous 5.

I am going to just put it out there, this isn't even a prediciton any longer. Physical Media is already dead. It just doesn't know it yet. In 10 years, very little will be shipped on physical media because -

1) the concept of "ownership" is changing
2) on-demand accessibilty reduces the need to have it on-site
3) "cloud" storage size, reliability, and accessibility will improve dramatically

If you still don't believe me, ask your kids or a bunch of teenagers how many physical CD's, DVD's, Blu-Ray's they own now and how often they buy more. Then ask how many of them have Hulu, Amazon Prime, iTunes, Zunes, VuDu, and how much YouTube they watch.

These are kids that have grown up in a world where the Internet and Cell Phones have *always* existed. The 16 year olds of today are going to graduate college in 6-8 years, get apartments and not even have land-line telephones because they have already had a cell-phone for over a decade. They may not even have TV's as we have them today and they certainly won't have desktops and laptops like we have today.

CD/DVD/Blu-Ray Sales have been in slow decline for years. Netbooks don't even have CD/DVD players in them. Many desktops and laptops don't either. Your guess is as good as mine on what hardware the Windows 8 slate machines will have, but my bet is that very few if any at all will have a player.

Physical media *IS* dead.....

-Chris

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-Chris

Yup. They will very soon have a place in your basement, next to your floppy discs, VHS tapes and cassettes.

Chris,

Your argument for applying the product life cycle would work if karaoke music were a tangible good. We are talking about intellectual property here though, which is an intangible good. Since you are somewhat new to the karaoke business, let me sort of give you a run down of what has happened over the last 10-15 years.

Until probably 2000, the vast majority of karaoke hosts (I'd estimate in excess of 95%) were all disk based. The price of music was still around it's peak, but coming down. At that that time, Pioneer Laser Disks were pretty much phased/pushed out of the marketplace ($5+ per song). SC & Pioneer & DK were the leaders - they put songs out 3-6 months after they became popular. Pioneer was being pushed out because the cost of their disks and the fact that they lacked portability. They, as well as SC & DK, were also being pushed out because of competition from manu's that offered "Hits of the Month". You see, at some point the marketplace became saturated with "old hits" and therefore, most of the new purchases were in new music. The faster these hits made it to the marketplace, the better. I can understand why Pioneer went under (cost and time of producing videos), but Sound Choice NEVER understood the dynamics of the marketplace. They rested on their laurels, and they were the next major manu to go out of business (of producing new music).

At this point, you could easily get 75% of the cost of a CDG if you were to sell it. A collection of CDGs could net you 60%+ of your original cost, depending on the manu and the quality of the collection.

Shortly after the turn of the century, digital music started to make it's way to into the karaoke industry. CAVS offered their systems with push button control. No more lugging disks to your show; it's all on a hard drive. They were behind the advent of "Super - CDG" technology, which was basically hundreds of songs on one DVD disk that also played at the push of a button on their 203-G player. KJ's could also convert & load their existing libraries to Super CDG, so the race to covert songs to digital format was on. During all of this (with one exception), the major manus attempted to protect their goods from being "format shifted" by stern warnings on their products about the penalties of any sort of duplication. It was, IMO, their intent to facilitate the exposure of a pirate. If their product was on a computer, it was illegally duplicated. There were few lawsuits, but manus would drop charges if suspected KJs could prove "1:1" compliance.

At this point, you could get 50% of the original cost of your CDG, or about 40% of the cost on the open market - once again, dependent upon the quality of the collection.

That one exception to major manu's protecting their goods from media shifting was Chartbuster. They partnered up with CAVS and began offering their Essentials 1-6 on Super CDG. You could get 450 of their best hits of all time for about $50. If you spent $300, you had 2,700 quality renditions of the most popular songs. IMO, Chartbuster never offered these Super CDGs on their own website, and were available only through CAVS (although they became prevalent on Ebay eventually).

If I may continue this digression, CB would talk in circles for over a year about their product being offered on Super CDGs. They are on record here saying that they never authorized their products to be put onto Super CDGs. THEN, they claimed that all Super CDGs with their products were pirated. THEN, they said that most Super CDGs bearing their product were counterfeit. And THEN, they finally acknowledged that their product was indeed legal on at least some Super CDGs, but CAVS (or their disk maker) overran the license agreement and continued to produce them without their permission. These Super CDGs are gone from the marketplace now. If you happen to find one on Ebay, you are lucky and you should scoop it up!

With all this music now being shifted to digital format, piracy became rampant. Those protection measures that I mentioned before are gone. You used to be able to say that any karaoke music from the major manus on a computer in digital format was illegal (and technically, it still is for commercial purposes). But, Pop Hits monthly went to digital releases a year or two ago. SC, before going to litigation mode started offering their library through the GEM series. And, CB started offering SD cards, and now (assuming DigiTrax will pick up where CB left off) hard drives loaded with their music, streaming service, etc. No longer can you say with near as much certainty that a computerized host is in possession of illegally duplicated music. Spotting a pirate has become much more difficult.

So now, all those disks from major manus that were purchased at an average of $15 each are now worth a fraction of the cost. Got a collection? Good luck. I am willing to bet that they would only fetch 15-20% of their cost now. And, it isn't entirely because of piracy. IMO, major manus like CB & SC have had an effect in the marketplace equal to the effect of piracy because of their over saturation of karaoke music into the marketplace before their eventual demise.

And, as I mentioned before, their fight against piracy is not to punish illegal KJs, it is to SELL them products, and to turn them into LEGAL KJs, or LEGAL competition. The manus offer this quick settlement and it's over. They get what they want out of the deal, but we get screwed. And to think, most of their leads were generated from honest hosts who were duped into participating into what was dubbed the fight against piracy, but what turned out to be a major marketing and revenue generating activity for the manus.

Yes, whether you realize it or not, those of us who diligently purchased their music over the course of many years got screwed.

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

Thanks a lot. Can't believe it took my 7 years to find this place!

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Terry O'ke--- Fake Music for Real People.

Exactly.

I guess it depends on what you believe is a 'reasonably short amount of time'. 10 years? Even if very little physical media is still being shipped in 10 years that doesn't sound dead to me. At the rate tech doubles 10 years seems like an eternity. To me it seems that cost of packaging and distribution is the driver here. There will need to be storage devices to hold and easily transport digital purchases and downloads(whatever form that may be SD, HD).

Regardless of what happens to the use or availability of karaoke discs (or music discs for that matter) I still own the content on them and can shift them to whatever new storage format the WIN 8 platform, autos, home theatre, supports.

Will discs eventually see their sunset? Sure, but if physical media is dead...there are a lot of zombies walkin' around.

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-Kona

@TroyVnd - I appreciate the post you made. It does lend some perspective to the issue. It doesn't really change the fact that physical media is a dead format though. As you noted, the IP is what we are really after. If the cost of the IP is artifically high because of the production time or the cost of the storage media itself, then as those costs change (usually going down over time), the cost of the IP also changes.

I mentioned the whole early adopter scenario of the people buying up the first version of the iPhone at a premium. That applies to most any technology. The early adopters subsidize the later adopters. The people to jump in first pay a higher price. There is a difference with karaoke though because of the mis-steps by the manufacturers and the unrestrained growth of piracy.

I have entered the KJ market at a significantly lower cost than any of the 20 year folks. Ten years down the line, those KJ's will enter at even lower costs than me.

I do agree that long time disc based hosts have gotten a raw deal. That said, if I could go back in time and choose a different career path, even knowing what I know now, I would love to be a 20 year karaoke host.

-Chris

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-Chris