Karaoke Forums

not once has a DJ ever been harassed by the rights holders. and as it stands, it appears they don;t see the benefit in it anyway or SC would have their support.

agreed

you are exactly right. $200 a month to get loads of content without purchase and new material as well from many manus was too much but $200 to get no content except what you already purchased and no new content at all is reasonable?

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Paradigm Karaoke, The New Standard.......Shift Happens

No there is a clause saying no more than 10% SC growth from the original cert.without being recertified (letting them know what you got). So he couldn't just buy another library.

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

No one is disputing that you can look at the properties of an individual music file without a tool. We're developing a tool that will automate that process and generate a report.

Absolutely freakin' awesome - and germaine!

Great post.

Note: Meant for the Penguin Playwrite above..

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

" Disc based and loving it..."

By visiting the website, and reading the comments here. No where does it say what will happen to those who do not comply. So my curiosity comes to arise...

If I am compliant, and other companies in my town are not, are they then given the opportunity to pay 200$ per month or are they just being brought to court. Will you shut them down.
In my town only 2 of 15 or so are legal. I have to now work these cheaper jobs to keep working... I am more than happy to pay $200 per month, to rid of these pirate KJ's. Also I only work 4 - 5 days a month because of so many other karaoke jocks in town, you now want me to give you a 1/4 of what I make and I only have 3200 SC songs not 16.5k.

On the other side, why when I have complied to the rules, the rules constantly change. Who is to say the rules won't change again in 5 years.. Now you wan't double.

I have bought my music and will fight til my dying day that I can do whatever I want with it. You call it media shifting, I call it mine. With that being said I will not put any software on my computer from you so you can inspect my files. When we first started ripping cd's with cd+ripper back in the early 2000's alot of files were ripped at 128 bit. It was faster and we didn't know any better then.
Is this a constant monitoring, is it one time. My show computers do not have WiFi or Ethernet jacks. Never on the internet.

Who is to stop every other company from doing the same thing. Will DJ and MM come back to strong arm me as well.

My thought is why would you care if I retire or refuse to use SC products anymore. When I purchased these items you didn't own the company and have made no revenue from me. Now I feel like because I made a conscious decision to stay legal I have to pay consistently to prove it. Yet I have no idea how you would stop the other pirates. They don't need to pirate any more songs.. they already have 150,000 and use youtube to play items they do not have...


Just my thoughts.
Chaz

I can't speak for other companies.

As for what happens to operators who don't comply? PEP's approach will not be different from Slep-Tone's. We will continue to conduct investigations, sue infringers, and offer a variety of settlement options, some of which include getting out of the business entirely. One goal of these settlements is requiring pirates to get on the same footing, cost-wise, as legitimate operators. For that reason, pirate operators whom we sue will not be allowed simply to sign up for HELP. They will have to atone for the past infringement first.

As for your last paragraph...if you choose to retire or stop playing SC, that's up to you. We have long said that there are three ways to satisfy us, and two of them cost you nothing:

1) Get certified (or, now, enroll in HELP),
2) Play from original SC discs, or
3) Don't play SC tracks.

Any of those are fine with us.

Unfortunately, legitimate, hardworking KJ's are also also having to pay more just to stay in business. A one time certification fee to verify they are on the up and up was tolerable. A monthly fee to do what they have been doing for the last 2 decades is a tax and makes it even more difficult to be profitable against pirate operators.

Pirates will continue to steal non-SC music, have the same low overhead they have always had, and still charge rates below what a legitimate operator needs to survive. Whereas legitimate operators now have the pressure of figuring out how to pass on the *significantly* higher cost of doing business to their customers or sacrifice significant profitability.

As I noted to Kurt in email, had I skipped certification, this new program could potentially cost me $20,000 a year. In spite of me gloating somewhat in a previous post, the more I consider the program, the more I dislike about it and the more I think this will be the nail in Sound Choice coffin unless they make some adjustments.

More thoughts later......

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-Chris

Unfortunately this is going to be the truth. All I see happening is when pirates get their loaded drives, they simply delete the SC content & continue to do business as always. It will do nothing to curb piracy in karaoke overall. As many claim here, SC isn't a needed product anymore with so many on par companies. I couldn't afford to pay the HELP program, luckily I got certified before. But I also no longer can afford to keep up and maintain regular working players anymore either to play from discs due to piracy already driving down what the bars are willing to pay and still make an ok living.

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

no one gets a show because they have a particular brand, nor loses any show because they lack any particular brand. the pirates, as Chris mentioned, will still have 150,000 tracks including those by the companies that remade a bunch of what SC had, some of even better quality as technology has improved since SC stopped production. this has no effect on leveling the playing field unfortunately.

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Paradigm Karaoke, The New Standard.......Shift Happens

Who here said they felt it was a reasonable/ok price (other than Mr. Harrington)?

The Penguin thanks you

Why would it? The same company making a lame attempt to distance itself from it's own self-defecated label.


Aside from that: I would have no objection to paying a monthly fee to the publisher/owners in hopes of continued new production. SC/Phoenix? Nah. Oh, they might produce a few tracks in the future so they can claim that they are in the biz, but to no avail.

I'm not a computer host, but I have no objection to whatever Digitrax charges for their service to others. Why? They are still contributors to the industry. SC/Phoenix, in my opinion, is nothing but a blood-sucking tick, a parasite. Just my humble opinion.

However, if you have been on these forums long enough you will note that they have lost almost all of any support that they started with. Considering the high individuality, egos, and sharp differences in business structures here, it would seem to me that when so many different-style folks blow off this company- even those who strongly supported them to begin with - that there may just be something fundamentally wrong with the whole SC/Phoenix business plan.

Your mileage may vary.

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

" Disc based and loving it..."

Absolutely no one I've seen so far. I do hope Mr. Harrington is taking note of that.

If I'm planning to work another 10 years, the cost (to placate one manufacturer, with no new content to boot) just jumped from $150 to $24,000. Who gets away with a 16,000% price increase, or even expects too?

The arrogance is amazing. Stop working? I can't -- for me this is rent money. Stop using the SC discs I paid so much for? That's over a quarter of my library, and I just can't afford it. (Took years to pay off my initial investment, back when I had a day job and was planning this as my post-retirement job.) Carry my discs and get a cdg player again? No way. They're too heavy, I'm too old, they won't even fit in the car when the full PA is loaded now, and I'd be running a slower show and have to worry about the dang things skipping again when the dancing gets heavy, not to mention lost or stolen discs -- I had plenty of discs stolen back in the day. And mechanical disc players fail. I am not moving back into the dark ages for anyone.

So that leaves shelling up the $200 a month extortion fee. Actually for most of the last 10 years I've had one show a week that pays $100. Other bars come and go but usually don't last long, because they can get someone with 100,000 songs who'll work for $50. Most places I can't even get a foot in the door asking over $100.

I'd have jumped at the chance to pay $200 for media-shifting permission. Or a couple bucks a disc. Or something per song. Just to put the entire worry to rest. (My rips are already 320bps, and done at 4x to preserve the quality of the graphics.) They could even ask $200 per year and I'd come up with it.

But $200 a month is up to half my monthly earnings... before tax!

They can claim whatever new "rules" they want, but they can't get blood from stone. And just because they claim something is now the law of the land, it does not make it so.

You have 100,000 tracks?

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

" Disc based and loving it..."

Chris, for one if I remember right. Many others certainly didn't knock the price like they did when the Cloud came out.

I am not happy with the price. Nor was i thrilled with the Karaoke Cloud Price when it rolled out.

Here is my original analysis of Karaoke Cloud Pro - http://karaokescene.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24209&hilit=digitrax

The only thing this pricing does is set the bar high enough that someone has to really think about how they are going to be able to profit. In the case of PEP, it the way it is implemented now makes it such that EVERY Sound Choice user now has to decide between 1) Continuing to use SC material and significantly reducing their profitability, or 2) dropping the brand just to maintain the same level of income, or 3) invest in a disc player and the additional work of integrating and maintaining extra gear, again, just to maintain the same level of profitability.

It really is a raw deal for the non-certified folks out there and I absolutely empathize with you (in spite of my previous post where I gloated somewhat).

Similar to the Karaoke Cloud Pro service, the ONLY folks I see this being even remotely a decent deal for is BRAND NEW KJ's, and Pirates that want to protect themselves from litigation. The latter will probably not be signing up in droves as evidenced from previous certification efforts. They will wait until they get pinched.

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-Chris

This isNOT a good thing for New KJs, UNLESS they ARE pirating music. If they want to shift, this is STILL a total waste of money, unless they have ALL 16,000 SC songs. And even THEN, there is no new material included. This truly IS a protection scheme. And to MY way of thinking, and I don't care who disagrees, it is nothing but PURE greed!! I don't see how they think this will draw more customers. SC material just isn't THAT good to warrant paying $200 a month to use it, and then have to pay more IF they ever produce anything again. For that kind of money, Karaoke Cloud is actually a better deal because you get new songs from time to time.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

Was that question to me? Nope, nowhere near! I have under 10,000 (with most of the duplicates removed). That sounds pretty tiny by many folks standards, but I prefer quality over quantity. And that cost me quite enough. About 200 SC discs in the collection, for most of which I paid $30 before shipping. Was paying $35 plus shipping for the first 50 or so. Did about 10 SC custom discs too. So that's about 7 grand spent on SC content.

Sound Choice is opening the certification period to get certified. If u take advantage of this u won't be required to pay any monthly fees.

i think it was deceMy nt and the right thing to do to re-open audits temporarily. My only question is will certification still be available for Canadian hosts?

-James