In reality, she had the most obsessive/compulsive library I have seen to date. If there ever was a person who had to have every single copy of every single track produced, I apparently had found her. Some artist/title combinations had DOZENS of duplicates, sometimes even three or four or more within the same BRAND!!! Now, before you ask the obvious piracy question... I have no idea whether her collection is legit, because I only saw her listing (digital of course, no way would she be able to print it) and not her discs, if she even used them.

It got me to thinking... I usually produce my listings/books with the intent on listing only ONE version of a song (for a given artist), choosing the best version I have available. I tend to think I can be a good judge of that, based on my experience and musical ear. Do most people list all their duplicates too? I had never seen that before.

This person's collection rivaled the library of congress for karaoke, but I really didn't think it was too realistic to advertise 50,000 songs, when clearly there were far fewer actual individual song titles. So I did a little research on my own.

I took all of the Spotlights, Foundations, and Bricks, and complied the songs and artists, discs and tracks in a fantasy database of an entire SC library (as if I was a KJ with unlimited resources). Once compiled, I found that there were just about 13000 tracks across all these discs.

OF these 13,000, just over 11,500 are actually distinctly different songs... (give or take for some spelling or naming inconsistencies). That's impressive on it's own.

I suppose if you had a need, you could add to those the latin series, and reminiscing, but I view those as kind of limited markets... not everyone can use those in their shows.

So, being generous with songs that have been done only by other labels, is it safe to assume that the total karaoke song population is at most around 15,000 to 20,000 songs at best?

I tend to think that most working KJ's are doing great to actually have 5000 distinctly individual songs, and a lucky few actually exceed 10,000! All this is kind of amazing when you consider that in the course of a given 4-hour night, you'll hear at most 60 of these played Better yet, if you played 365 days a year and had 60 different songs each night, at the end of a year you would have only heard 21,900 songs!

Plus hauling the things around. That has to be a minimum of 2500 discs. If you use binders or disc sleeves, there's probably a bunch of discs in there that are glued to the sleeve/pocket by now.

In my database, I have a total of 32227 different songs available for karaoke. And that's including all the various broadway showtunes, gospel, Portuguese songs, Spanish songs, etc.

It's possible there are 50,000 individual songs if you include all the songs in Chinese, Taiwanese, Danish, French, etc. but very unlikely anyone has all that.

I think the only benefit of having that many songs (unless you have someone like me at your show, a record collector and music buff who'll look for anything off-the-wall to sing) is for promotional purposes, and it has gotten consistently huge crowds to his shows. Drawbacks--think of all the songs in a library that huge that NOBODY sings, also it's a lot to carry as well.

Best,

Let's face it, the casual singers are the ones that are going to sing "Friends in Low Places" and "Summer Nights." Not the hardcore enthusiasts (except for those "wild hair" nights LOL). I don't see the need to confuse the casual singer with duplicates, plus, we have over 10,000 unique song titles after the duplicates have been removed. This has come from around 8-9 years of collecting. We've had to split our books down so some are sorted by title and some by artist - or the books would just be huge!

While I readily admit that there are songs in my books that I've never heard sung, many of them came from collecting disks with other songs that are sung on a regular basis. Because SC has done a great job offering Headbanger's and other specialty series, we do offer loads of songs that the average operator in town does not. And, yeah, I do enjoy it when someone sings a song I've not heard in years (just last weekend someone sang "Bang A Gong" by T-Rex and did a fantastic job! I never hear that song!)

However, when I did include duplicates, I often was asked "What is the difference between the multiple versions of (insert song title here)?"

It seemed to me that listing duplicates created more confusion and thicker (i.e. heavier and more costly) books.

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Originally posted by bwolf:
I find it kind of ironic that all of us are bragging about our libraries (we have about 13,500)when only 60 or 70 songs on average are sung a night, and some more than once an evening and basically the same songs night after night. It's nice to have the songs that people like, but it's also money out the window if the majority of your songs aren't even touched. Just my $.02

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Well, some of us have been building a library since the early to mid 90's - this understandably will give a larger selection. Some just want the bragging rights to say they have so many songs so they will buy every $5 disc they can find - good or bad & list them not paying any attention to quality. Then you get the fanatics that think they need every single song of every single label just for the chance that someone will pick that obscure song that ABSOLUTELY nobody else has.
I'm in the 1st catagory, still carefully select discs - not a flavor of the month follower, I go strictly by requests & need a few for the same song by different people before considering an addition.
You never can stop buying discs - requests always come in & you DO have to keep up with the clubs down the street, but there is no reason to get everything.

I Still Believe in You -- Desert Rose Band
James Dean -- Eagles
Drinking My Baby Off of My Mind -- Eddie Rabbit
Honky Cat -- Elton John

I rarely see these songs in karaoke books, yet they are great songs and fun to sing. Building a good collection is a real art.

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Building a good collection is a real art.

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I just shake my head.