rate of pay around the country.

[SteveWalker]

kilith,

I know many KJ's who have sustained their karaoke business since 1988 starting out with the laser discs. There are just too many KJ's who will work for $50-$75 a night which hurts the business. You will find the top people in ANY field who make the BIG money for what they do. There are many on this board who are doing this but they do not represent everyone. Just as in sales: the top 3% make 90% of the money. You've seen the ads in the paper that say you can make $120,000/year but the average guy will make $30,000.

[alanross]

Originally Posted by SteveWalker

you can make $120,000/year but the average guy will make $30,000.

That is absolutely true. And they don't tell you that the $120,000 is not the NET figure, that's the gross. AND, you need to be in a market that will sustain your company doing 600 shows per year @ $200/show.

That necessarily breaks down to needing two systems, each doing 6 shows/week @ $200/show. That means you necessarily need 2 copies of every disk and you have to pay another person to run the second system - unless you yourself can handle doing two shows a day, every day, six days a week, all year long.

In my second year of business, I did ten shows a week, myself, for about four months before the season ended. For another 5 months of that year, I was still doing seven shows a week and even in Dec, Jan and Feb, I was doing six shows a week. I was just building the business at the time, so I wasn't able to get more than $150 a night. Even after all that work, I still didn't gross anything like six figures, but once I started hiring, it still took two more years to build up enough business and raise our rates to break the $100,000 mark.

Even then, the net profit is very low and it's an enormous burden to be the top entertainment company in your area. To keep good hosts you need to pay them at least half of what you gross each night. You must keep up on all the latest music and you must remain vigilant in knowing your competition.

Preditors will chomp at your heels trying to replace you in the local hot spots. Everyone wants to play in the best venues and if you're the one playing there, you can bet there's a line of wanna-bes waiting to take you out.

If you work hard and put an enormous amount of energy into it, you can make a living working solely as a Karaoke show host. But running a Karaoke business is something you have to have in your soul or you won't last five years in the business. You will spend a lot of time and money, make very little profit and in the end, very likely sell your equipment and go back to being a regular Karaoke patron. The stress of handling more than seven shows a week can be debilitating. When you have to start dealing with employees on top of it... let's just say, my hair used to be a lot thicker and a lot darker.

By the way, if you are in an area where you can only make $150/night you will need to perform 800 shows that year to gross $120,000. That's more than 15 shows a week - every week. You'll need three systems.

To earn a NET figure of $120,000, you will need to more than double that and perform about 40 shows a week. But you also have to be very careful to watch your expenses or you could have to do more shows to make up the difference.

The best our company has ever done is 23 shows a week during the summer tourist season. Those four months go by very quickly and then we're back to between 12 & 15 shows a week. In the dead of winter we're lucky if we can maintain 10 shows. But even with all this work (and we're making $200.00 a night), we've never NET more than $40,000.

Karaoke is not a get rich quick money maker. Karaoke has to come from your soul or it's just a hobby. Do the math.