rate of pay around the country.

[kilith]

Well in the world of karaoke it is so easy to go out and buy one system. Burn all the CD's buy a cheepy second system and then charge at both shows much less. Most bars around Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa all will pay 250-300 a night.

Anyway I charge anywhere from $200-300 a night depending on the size of the place I am working at and how many hours I play.

I agree that yes some bars can not pull in the people. However I work in a town of less then 300 people once a month in a small town in Wisconsin. They pay me $300.00 each time I do it there. New Years Eve I will be making about $450-600 because the bars in Wisconsin do not close except for 2 hours on New Years Day which they do somewhere at like 10AM. Last year I played from 9PM to 5:30AM I was dead tired but it was well worth the fun and money that was made that night.

What people need to start doing is busting these people burning or copying CDG's. I do not know how many of you out there can say they have a PURE legal systems. (that means no burned copies of your CDG's and no copied computers of your CDG's running Hoster or other karaoke software.) However these people are a lot of the problem out there. They might have paid what $1000 for a few cheep speakers, power amp, and a $100.00 DVD player that can play CDG's. They invested very little for 3 or 4 systems and did it illegally and then undersell the quality sounding systems with the money in the music library. When you have these type of systems out there only charging from $75-150 a night there is no way a legal system can make it. I have a system that is over 12 years old. Now there are systems all computerized (I am now as well with Hoster) but it is even cheeper to buy a few cheep laptops copy all the files over and even just use Winamp or some other free karaoke hosting software.

So now is there anyone out there that still busts these type of systems? I know of a few in Minnesota with 6 to 8 systems running around that have burned CDG's in their systems.