mrmarog wrote:
I have a complete set of the Essentials 1-6 (180 discs) and pieces of 7-9. I purchased SCDG sets 5 & 6 on Ebay a couple of years ago and they sure look legit to me. The packaging was the most convincing part since it arrived in a very professional shrink wrapped DVD movie type box with all the details written on it. I paid about $40 each.
I have no idea whether yours are real or not, and they might have been sold at a loss just to get something out of them, but...
The minimum royalty on karaoke songs is about .14 per track, not to mention the fixing fees and other charges.
The CB Essentials discs have 450 tracks each, so the royalties due the publishers would be about $63 for each disc. That tells me either that (a) somebody's taking a pretty big hit on those discs or (b) the publishers didn't get their royalties.
This is not a comment on your use or your operations, just an interesting (to me) point about the economics of that kind of deal.
I own a set of the CB SCDG's and used them for eight years in my show until my retirement at the end of October. I have my original discs and my paperwork for them. Really I never had to show proof to anyone. As to who could check you or audit your discs, your guess would be a good as mine. Originally PR maintained they had the right to audit these SCDG's even though they are a CAVS product. They have sort of backed off on that claim. CAVS themselves are not auditing their products so who has standing to question the use of the product is still not settled. I called CAVS the maker of the product and they told me that this whole legal process of the manus is just a scam, with racketeering over tones. Selling protection where there is no authority to provide it, since the contents of the tracks belongs to someone else besides the manus. They only license to make their product, and in many cases such as CB they did not pay the proper fees, even though they had assured CAVS they had.
It is really unimportant since I own the original cd's too.