Videoke: My Way
I’m not a good singer. If you pit me against William Hung, you’d listen to Hung any day of the week over me. However, that’s not enough to keep me from grabbing a microphone and contributing to the noise pollution of the world. Last weekend, my Makati friends and I went to Providence Building (in front of DLSU) for a night of videoke. Not really the coolest or best place to be, but hey, who cares when you’re having fun?
Even though each song cost a measly 5(five) bucks, no throat pain was enough to stop us from making short work of P500 worth of tokens that night. We started at 10pm and ended by 3am. Woot! Good thing that the place was open 24 hours a day.
This isn’t your usual bar+videoke machine setup though. Each videoke slot machine had its own room so you don’t have to listen to some schmuck sing My Way for the 412qwerty56th time. There were around thirty rooms all in all - each occupying not more than 4×4meters of floor space. In tagalog, they had small rooms and a batallion of five would just fit nicely with a little room for maneuvering. The walls were transparent and sound-proofed glasses. Transparent to avoid anything kinky or illegal from happening and sound-proof to contain the frustrated sound waves within.
Although it doesn’t really sound much, what got me blogging about it was the computer network installed in their place. At the second floor of the building where we stayed, the server for all the songs and videos was located. In an air-conditioned room on its own, a desktop server can be seen connected to a 48-port switch - most of which had LAN connections that vanished into the ceilings just to reappear in the karaoke rooms. It seems that some smart bastard centralized all the songs (midi+text) so that updating the song list would be easier. Even the videos were reused and just recycled for all the songs. There were approximately 20 different types of videos of scantily clad women and Discovery Channel snippets that were rotated randomly for every song.
If you’re thinking of how the hell did the place become profitable, the beverages man. The beverages. Mineral water, Iced Tea, Beer and Softdrinks cost an arm and a leg there! A mineral water worth P9 outside was sold for P14 inside. Beers P20 outside cost P35 inside. Enough said.
I can’t help but admire such a smart setup! I’d set up something like that myself if only I had capital! However, I won’t just copy such business model - I’m going to improve on it - and I’m going to do it My Way.