Karaoke Forums

Bastiat, I guess I am confused by this wording:



Are you saying that the only songs that are popular are the ones that you intend to release in this format? There are TONS of songs that are/were popular that were never released by any karaoke manufacturer.

If you want to create a product that nobody else has......THAT'S the one. Lyrics or no lyrics, create tracks...probably by request since the common songs are done already......that people can order for a reasonable price......

When Sound Choice creates a CDG track without having the proper licensing; they will be hoping to sell thousands of copies of that track along with whatever other tracks that will be on a particular disc. If there are 50 thousand KJs in America alone and half of those KJs buy a particular Sound Choice disc at 30 dollars per disc. Sound Choice generates $750,000.00 in revenue for that one single disc. Going after a piece of that relatively large pie is worth it for a rights holder like BMI.
If I make those same 15 songs using Beethoven software; it would add very little to my bottom line at the end of the year. Some, if not most, of the songs might not ever get sung at a show at all. It really would NOT be worth the time and effort for BMI to send an investigator to a single karaoke show to look for one of a kind, home made karaoke tracks. Even if they witnessed one of these tracks being played, the damages to their company is minscule if these tracks are one of a kind and not being sold by the thousands. Every KJ would have the same backing track but each version of the karaoke track would look slightly different. It's all about RISK vs. REWARD.

It just isn't worth it to anyone to go after an individual KJ for making one of a kind karaoke tracks. There just isn't any money in it. I think that is the thought process going on here. Bastiat is deciding to sell backing tracks and either giving away Beethoven or selling Beethoven software so the end user can make whatever songs that are available in the RYOK format. Unfortunately, they are sticking to the format of having to buy multiple songs that you may not want, in order to get the one or two songs that you do want. It's bad enough when you have to do that for completed karaoke tracks but to buy backing tracks of songs that may never get sung would be a deal breaker for many people. What would the KJ say to someone who wanted to sing a song on that disc. Well, I have the music if you know the lyrics by heart or I can have it for you with the lyrics next week? Not exactly a selling point. Something tells me that the graphics will be done in a very hasty manner which will make the songs unusable to the end user who would be seeing that unprofessional version for the first and most likely only time. There are lots of crappy homemade versions of karaoke tracks out there. I hope that the Beethoven software just doesn't end up adding to that pile of crap. You might go to one karaoke show where the KJ made a really good version of the song and the KJ in the next town has the song listed in his book exactly the same like PHN1401-06 and the guy did a horrible jon rendering the lyrics to the song. This will cause singers to avoid that brand all together because they will never know if they will be getting a good version or a bad version until it's too late. Your company name will be associated with some of the worst karaoke tracks on the market and you will have no control over the way they look. People will begin to associate every spelling error and every lyrical error with the Pop Hits Monthly name because most of the KJs will put that on their track name. There will be more errors in those files than there are in Karaoke Version and All Star Karaoke combined.

To mightywiz . . . I guess it was just a matter of time before “legal” questions would be introduced into the mix although I was so much hoping that it wouldn’t. Hopefully I can nip this in the bud by offering a full explanation as to why I won’t engage in these types of discussions. These forums seem to have no shortage of sidewalk lawyers and I’ve witnessed so much nonsense and bullshit going back and forth on the subject that I sometimes felt like I was living in a parallel universe. Without being dismissive of the importance of legalities, I have to remind you that I am not a lawyer and cannot nor will not engage in any legal debate nor will I provide you with legal advice (which by the way would be illegal) in any way, shape or form. If you want legal advice then you need to consult a lawyer.

With that having been said, I believe if you gave this some serious thought, you might reconsider asking such questions from the producer of the product for which you are concerned. In the first place do you actually think that any producer would provide you with an answer that might generate doubt or cause you to be disinterested in his/her product? Secondly, it would be so unwise for any producer to create a public record of his/her legal opinions. Anything can be used, abused, twisted, and taken out of context by opposing lawyers in litigation. Remember the old cliché “loose lips sink ships”? Last but not least is the fact that I would not be releasing a product that I thought was illegal. If I wanted to do that, I can think of several products with far greater marketing potential than RYOK.

What I can tell you however is that these tracks are legally licensed. A “mechanical” license has been drawn for each and every song in the offering, and we are not “bypassing” anything. It is also a fact (as sad as it is) that “the companies that own the music” i.e. music publishers can go after you for just about anything if they so desired. It’s all about the money my friend, and not loftier goals as they would have you think. There are only two companies that I know of that legally license their products for distribution here in the USA. There may be another but I can’t confirm so for now I can only attest to the two, and even at that, knowing the complexities in licensing songs for karaoke it is likely that they have “issues” as well. There isn’t a KJ on the planet that has a library of content void of illegally licensed products. Can a publisher “go after you” for that? Well what do you think? Will they go after you for that? I believe the answer is no.

So here is my advice to you. I can’t answer your legal questions even if I wanted to, but if you feel uncomfortable or if owning the product will cause you to stay awake at night, then I suggest this may not be the product for you, but I do sincerely appreciate your interest in it.

To BruceFan4Life . . . I couldn’t help but burst out into a serious belly laugh after having read your first paragraph. I was in desperate need of some comic relief so I thank you for that. I’m sure Kurt will be equally amused if he happens to read this thread as well. It never ceases to amaze me as to just how different the perception of what we producers do and how we profit, is from the reality of what we do and how we profit.

To clear up another piece of misinformation is that BMI is not involved nor does it investigate karaoke shows looking for illegal discs or “home made” karaoke tracks, or anything of the sort. That is outside of their authority and they have no legal standing to do such things. BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC are what are known as PROs (Performing Rights Organizations), meaning that their area of concern lies strictly with the performance of intellectual property and not the sale and distribution of it. However your remarks with regard to RISK vs. REWARD are much closer to reality.

Another piece of misinformation is the assumption that we will only be offering our tracks on disc. Downloads will be part of the model in the very near future while we begin the transition from a disc based marketing model to a disc based plus download marketing model.

As far as the rest of your comments, we’ll just have to wait and see. You are entitled to your opinion of course but bear in mind it is your opinion and not an opinion that I share. Only time will tell.

To KaraokeAmerica - I think you are confusing the product with the software, so let me try to clear this up for you.

We will continue to release current hits as we have for the past 18 years only in a different format. I’m not sure how you can interpret that as meaning that the only songs that we release are the only songs that are popular but I can assure you that I had no intention of implying such things.

What I did mean to imply by the “any popular song” comment is that the Beethoven software is capable of rendering a cdg file on any popular song and not just RYOK. However we have restricted its ability to recognize products from other producers, at least for the time being. There are several issues that need to be resolved before we open it up to the competition. I hope this clears it up for you.

Thank you for the reply!

I think it would be much clearer to all if you changed "any popular song" to "available tracks without lead vocals" but I am a known dummy and sometimes need to have things spelled out for me.....

There are opinions and then there are informed opinions. I've made a couple thousand home made karaoke tracks so I think my opinion on how difficult it is to make them well is more informed than the average karaoke enthusiast. I've seen many homemade karaoke tracks being used at karaoke shows that are just terribly made. They would have been better if there were no swipes at all because the timing of the swipes did more harm than good.

I was glad to read that individual downloads will be coming soon and that will be a plus but I made my statements about that before you ever mentioned it as a possibility. I wish you all the luck in the world with this new direction you are taking. I just hope you create songs that people want to sing instead of just creating more "filler" type tracks , like you have been doing for quite some time now. I really look forward to trying out this Beethoven software to see how much time will be saved in making a quality karaoke track. I use both Karaoke Builder Studio and Power Karaoke CDG Creator and it usually takes me close to an hour or more to finish up a karaoke track that I would consider a quality track. It sure would be nice to knock that time down to ten minutes.

To BruceFan4Life - Like I said before there is apparently a huge difference between perception and reality especially when it comes to karaoke. In fact the difference is more like that of a chasm than a minor fault. What you perceived to be “filler” music was a thought out program targeting a totally different market. We were not attempting to appeal to the mainstream which should be obvious.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough support for this type of product just yet so we’re forced to take another direction. You may not have been around back in October of 1995 when we introduced the very first monthly product of current music, called Top Hits Monthly. The common thought was that karaoke had no appeal to a younger audience for which current pop music appealed, and that we were crazy to think that anyone would buy that product. The product was not met with open arms and it literally took 3 months before we could even get it on the shelves. The rest as you know is history. It did finally reach the consumer and soon all of the naysayers began to follow suit even to this very day.

Unfortunately the same marketing mechanisms that existed back in 1995, no longer exist, so the chances of success in that product catching on had become very slim. In any event, I do appreciate your point with regard to how long it takes to author a karaoke track. In fact it was one of the motivating factors in creating the software to begin with. We do recognize that most of the difficulty lies within the wiping and that was where we spent most of our focus in Beethoven.

I no longer author karaoke tracks personally, but I had in the past used just about every authoring tool known to man other than the Alpha 10 (used by DK Karaoke) and Doug Carson’s tool, the name of which I can’t remember but I believe it was the tool that Sound Choice used on its tracks. I’ve used the Futureware tool which was a hardware/software application, the MTU tool, Karaoke Builder Studio and PowerKaroke. All of them have their own individual strengths and weaknesses. I had been partial to the MTU tool, and that might be due in part to the fact that I was deeply involved in its development both in financial terms and as an end user consultant. I liked the way you could drag and click the flags and that each word or phrase had its own flag. The two downsides to the tool were that you needed a special sound card used in what was at the time their flagship DAW called Micro Edit which was really a fantastic tool in its time, and it was limited in other ways.

Today my vote would be for either Karaoke Builder Studio or Power Karaoke CDG Creator. Of the two I it would appear from our experience that KBS is the more stable of the two in terms of duplicating masters and it also has a unique screen splitting feature that really is great for duets. For us it really doesn’t take us more than 10 minutes or so to author a complete track, but I can see how it would take an occasional user up to or even more than an hour per track. So please tell me your favorite and why. That is if you don’t mind.

I guess the next big question is:

is Beethoven going to be free or we gonna have to buy it?

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It's all good!

So let me get my head around this... You are going to take your music tracks (can be anything since they are not synchronised/licensed as karaoke) and embed/encode them with the lyrics or timing codes somehow.... sell or give away software "Beethoven" for the end user to then add lyrics to (sounds like LRC?) and then create a CDG file.

Is this what your are describing? It sounds ingenious and you clearly have been around long enough to have forgotten more than most of us know about this industry. But I can't help but wonder what the implications of your approach will be. You said you hoped that the legal questions about the concept could be avoided, but let's face it legal issues have had an impact on many of us on this forum.

Stellar has seen more than it's share of legal issues with publishers over the years. Some could argue that Stellar was the first karaoke producer casualty in the courtroom. I have always just taken it as a given that you were putting out obscure music because you had no choice. If major publishers won’t work with you - you put out music from people who will. It never occurred to me that you were catering to a specific market.

So if I am close to what the concept is here and I’m sure you will correct me, you will now completely go around the existing licensing schemes and put out anything you want since it is just the music. I can’t say that I don’t understand your motivation. The existing climate for companies like yours are ridiculous. But, you are basically saying that you aren’t going to play by the existing rules anymore and we can all go along for the ride in a grey area and test the waters. I will stay tuned!

Just a few comments based on my own personal opinions, your mileage may vary.

If this is indeed released as an 'audio only' product, then I would NOT hold not recognizing a song against Bastiat or stellar. Rememeber in there heyday they were EXTREMELY good at picking songs that hadn't become popular YET but as soon as they hit regular radio play were HUGE hits. In effect, stellar was releasing music ahead of everyone else.

If they don't have to put up with all the licensing bullshit that regular karaoke producers do, they may be able to return to this model of releasing music again.

That being said however, I truly hope that Bastiat will take to heart the comment that they now have an opportunity to release music that has NEVER been on karaoke. Just take a gander at all the music request forums the opportunity is ripe with possibilities.

Perhaps they could set up a place on their website to take requests and they could release a 'Most Wanted' product like sunfly used to do with their most frequent requests. I may not be hosting anymore, but being the karaoke addict that I am, I would STILL pay good money for a product like this.. Hell I would probably even get a subscription again.

As for the authoring software, I will just have to wait and see how it works. Too date, all the authoring software has required that you tap out the syncronization with the space bar. A skill that I do not have the patience, or dexderity to accomplish well.

-James

I use KBS as well with some pretty good results. The newer versions can also drop to HD video format as well.
What is going to the final result of this product (mp3g, kma, bin, avi,etc), can it be played through any regular hosting software or is it going to need a proprietary player?

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My favorite of the 2 programs is definitely Karaoke Builders Studio. The main reason is probably that I am just more comfortable using it because I started using it years before I started using Power Karaoke's program. My favorite feature of Power Karaoke is it's ability to import an existing karaoke track and edit it in many different ways. Power karaoke can also use bigger fonts on up tempo songs without the lyrics catching up with the swipes and creating a terrible mess on the screen. KBS doesn't seem to swipe as quickly as Power Karaoke does.

Power Karaoke crashes way more often than KBS so you quickly learn to hit the save button early and often. I find the final editing to be easier to use with KBS. I find myself creating a song from scratch using KBS and once finished, I import the KBS file into Power Karaoke to take advantage of their better swiping ability with larger fonts.

I started out using Dart Pro but didn't really like it all that much. The first time someone showed me MTU's version with all of those flags, it just looked way too complicfated to me so I never bothered with it. I have no idea what using Beethoven will be like but hopefully it will be as easy as you say. I find it hard to believe that a 4 minute long song can be completely finished in 10 minutes. You would have to be almost perfect on the first go through with the space bar and then you'd only have 5 or 6 minutes to edit the swipes properly. I'd love to see it done that quickly; especially on a song that you might be hearing for the first time.

And another question is, how will this be made available? Will it be sold exclusively through Stellar, or will it be sold through other vendors (both ONLINE sites and B&M Stores)?

So could you take an existing karaoke audio track and this software would create new graphics, removing any "trade dress" from the swipes? I could see that could become a cottage business pretty quickly, rendering companies who are looking for their logo on a screen to be out of luck. Interesting.

there are programs out there that can "watermark" music so they can identify who created it. and it's not hard to use either. even if the music is recompressed at a different bit rate the coding stays with it.... so they can identify it.

so even if you remove the trade dress, if they used the watermark they would still be able to identify if it's theirs or not.


so just removing the trade dress will not make you safe if they chose to start using it.

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It's all good!

But there is a reason that Sound Choice only files law suits based on their logo being shown. That is the onlu thing that they own. The music doesn't belong to them. They have a hard time winning cases when they see their logo being dusplayed by a computer. Do you think it will be even easier to determine if the music track is sonething that originated with them? It may be possible to watermark a music track but everyone already has the entire Sound Choice collection without any watermarks.....but keep trying to keep that atmosphere of fear going. It's working out real well. Sound Choice tried an end around to get around American licensing restrictions and now they are reaping what they have sown. PHM seemed to do the same thing and now they can't seem to get licensing for the songs that people actually want to sing. What goes around comes around. Now PHM wants people to make their own graphics because they can't afford to license them on their own. If you're not selling an actual karaoke track with graphics' can you still call what your selling karaoke? I think that just makes them another Backing Track supplier like i-tunes or amazon or karaoke version. I guess it's still better than what Sound Choice has become.

and there is already a program that removes every bit of "Trade Dress" from any exisiting karaoke track. It's called Karaoke CD+G Creator from Power Karaoke. It works especially well on Sound Choice tracks.

To mightywiz - The MSRP on Beethoven is $79.95. However, due to the fact that version 1.0 is not slick looking and rather ugly, clumsy and needs 3rd party software support to complete its mission we are not charging for this version. If you were ever in the military think of it as a military version. There will be upgrades to version 1.0 i.e. 1.1, 1.2 etc. and these will be distributed for free as well. Version 2.0 however will be self-contained and will get a face lift so that it looks more like the type of software to which consumers have been accustomed, and it will only be free with a product purchase.

As far as watermarking RYOK, that is an attempt at futility. I’m not going to provide anyone with instructions here as to how to remove watermarks but it is a fairly simple procedure, digital fingerprinting on the other hand not so much, but still not impossible. I’ve seen the term “trade dress“ used quite often on this forum and almost always incorrectly. You can’t remove “trade dress” from a product because for all intents and purposes there is no “trade dress” in a karaoke product. You can remove trademarks and wordmarks but not trade dress.