When I got home today some boxes were piled outside the front door. Turns out they were full of karaoke discs: over 300 discs with 6000 songs in all. Nice of the postman to leave them there!
Kroaky's song collection is coming along well. So far we have made deals with two of the larger karaoke manufacturers to take their songs. Combined with the songs we have already own we now have about 10,000 songs and it looks like we'll have over 12,000 by opening time. I'm working with several other song production companies now to add their collections to the set, so we can get ready to print our songbooks.
Making the songbooks is not easy. Firstly, we have to get all the songs into digital format (a huge task in itself), then load them into our karaoke software, then export the song list into a database, then export that to Excel, then sort and remove duplicates, then index all the songs with the song numbers then put that back into the database and load it back into the karaoke software. Then we have to export the list again, print the database, convert it to PDF and send it to the printer. I'm tired even thinking about it!
Because the main songbook will be quite large we're also making separate kids' song books. We'll also make a shorter book of the most popular tracks in each genre: Best 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, best country, hip-hop, indie, Christmas, gospel, reggae, Broadway and so on, so that you can get started choosing songs easily and not get "song-blindness" -- so overwhelmed by the choice that you go into a trance and miss your turn!
Once the books are ready we'll put the song list online so that you can see if Kroaky knows your favorite artist or song. If not, please feel free to make a request and we'll see if he can get his sticky fingers on it.
