Karaoke Summit 2015

Join us for the Karaoke Summit 2015 webcast on October 22 at 1pm EST. Details to follow!

We’re keen to show Karaoke Jockeys and show hosts how they can double, triple or even quadruple their nightly revenue. There’s a paradigm shift in karaoke entertainment that’s already begun rolling, and we want everyone to share in the opportunities and avoid the pitfalls that are to come.

Most karaoke professionals know their business well, and work hard to maximize the money they can make from each of their venues. These pros keep their eyes on the ball, understand how to play the long game, and look for ways to increase their take-home over time by building their clientele from the ground up.

Karaoke Summit 2015 is geared toward showing that forward-looking professional how to use new tools to increase the engagement their singers have over the course of each night of entertainment, how to solidify the relationships the singers have with the KJ and the venue, how to extract more revenue from each gig, and how to keep those customers returning again and again.

The Smartphone Revolution It’s not hard to understand that “the Internet changes everything”, especially now that everyone carries more computing power in their pocket than NASA once used to put astronauts on the moon.

What’s not immediately clear is what opportunities these fundamental shifts in behavior offer the karaoke industry.

Certainly there are some major players in the karaoke space vying to put that killer karaoke app on the smartphones of the world. Indeed, we are one of these. But while the others are either focusing on a consumer play, or leveraging novelty in order to move as many apps as possible before the flavor-of-the-minute moves on, we want our entry into the market to accomplish much broader goals.

We asked ourselves, what if a karaoke application could not only benefit the consumer through convenience, pricing and availability, but also give the professional KJ and their venues an opportunity to make more money, all while returning even more revenues back to the intellectual property owners on which karaoke music is based?

We believe a rising tide should lift all the boats.

The Stakeholders

So, who’s in those boats? Who stands to gain when the karaoke industry expands?

This is not intended as an exhaustive list, but all these stakeholders are bound to benefit.

The songwriters and composers who create the intellectual properties on which karaoke is founded.
The publishers of the underlying musical works.
The performers and recording artists of those songs.
Record labels who release the original versions of those songs.
Companies involved in the merchandising and cross-promotion of products associated with recording artists and their songs.
The studios who make and distribute karaoke versions.
Licensors and performing rights organizations.
Online and offline retailers of karaoke downloads and streams.
Software and hardware developers who facilitate karaoke consumption for both the consumer and professional markets.
App, software and hardware stores.
Platforms that deliver content to audio-visual devices.
Venues that feature karaoke.
Professional Karaoke Jockeys.
Singers who perform karaoke at home or in public.
Products and brands that sell through venues benefiting from karaoke.
The list is ordered more-or-less according to the supply chain, and not by importance. In fact, we believe that all the players are equally important, and wish to stress that the karaoke industry is in no way a zero-sum game. A system that nurtures and encourages the growth of our industry must by definition consider the interests of everyone.

Big Data for Small Business

So what brings all these stakeholders together in a way that’s meaningful for the end-user? The obvious answer is “the smartphone”. This single device has become not only ubiquitous (or nearly so), it also has the ability to tie all the stakeholders together with the patron in a way that builds persistent engagement over time. This is particularly true for the most desirable demographic groups – younger patrons willing to part with discretionary income in exchange for a superior karaoke experience.

Furthermore, once a smartphone platform has been established, one can use data about user behaviors to bring even more value to the stakeholders. Every single entity in the value chain can benefit from this, as long as the data is presented to them in a way that makes sense for their enterprise.

A word on data and privacy: End-users, and especially younger end-users, are more than willing to part with data regarding how they interact with their devices and apps. This is in fact the entire business basis for the behemoth known as Google.

How specifically might a venue or KJ benefit from this? Let’s look at some examples. As a venue, you’d love to be able to communicate with your patrons through their smartphones. You can offer drink and food specials, promote special or regular events, reward loyalty with promotions, and in general run an entire gamut of marketing and advertising strategies, directly to your patron, through a device with which they already have a strong affinity. And as they respond to these triggers, you can track how well each one performs, which lets you refine your messaging to become more and more effective over time.

As a KJ, you can use all the strategies above, as well as communicate to the patron where they are in the queue, alert them when it’s almost their turn to sing, give them a single-tap method of tipping you, allow limited interaction with the rotation by monetizing bumps, and much more.

By telling you how well your efforts are performing, you get immediate vital data on how to improve. And that’s key to growing your revenue, no matter where you are in the value chain.