ALL POPULAR SINGLES MAKE POPULAR KARAOKE SONGS

corporate events and house parties with inexpensive, eminently highquality karaoke songs and videos – as well as the equipment necessary to use them – all over the world.

Sunfly is one of the leading karaoke labels: they make karaoke possible for everyone, and have been for more than 25 years. They have a back catalogue more than 16,000 songs deep, each of them available for commercial or domestic use through their website, a rentable satellite laptop system or one of Sunfly’s monthly CD compilations, of which there are now nearly 400. Throughout the industry, the brand is inescapable. If you have done karaoke at any point since the early 1990s, there is a very good chance you have encountered the ubiquitous Sunfly bug.

Much about how Sunfly operates has changed since the label was founded in 1991. In the early days, songs and their accompanying lyric videos would be pressed onto costly Laserdiscs – a single copy, bearing just 15 tracks, would run an interested bar or private patron upwards of $160 a pop. But over the following years, the technology rapidly evolved. Laserdiscs lapsed into obsolescence, replaced by DVDs and CD-Gs, which could store small amounts of visual information in addition to sound. By the end of the last decade, karaoke had become a chiefly digital concern: first low-resolution files called Mp3+Gs, then high-definition Mp4s. Today, bars and lounges can download songs to their machines directly from Sunfly’s online servers – by subscription or a la carte – while non-professionals can stream the Sunfly library for less than $10 per month from home.

The process begins with Sunfly’s production team, who are responsible for determining demand. They keep a close eye trained on Billboard charts, radio playlists and upcoming new release schedules, and then pluck the songs best suited to their audience. But this is not a matter of simply choosing what’s hot: not all popular singles make popular karaoke songs. A track by Sia or Justin Bieber may have singers clamouring to perform them. A track by Lana Del Rey – however beloved – may not. Nevertheless, there is plenty of karaoke fodder on the airwaves. And Sunfly’s people are kept busy, putting out 20 to 30 new releases every month.

From here, the selected song requests will be distributed among Sunfly’s stable of professional music producers, whose job it is, in essence, to record an instrumental cover version of the song commissioned that sounds as similar to the original as possible. (Singers care a great deal about the authenticity of the karaoke tracks they’re crooning.) This procedure is astonishingly quick: If Taylor Swift drops a new single on Friday morning, Sunfly will commission a cover that afternoon and receive a completed recording by Tuesday. In cases of urgent interest – and when it comes to Swift, it usually is – Sunfly can have the lyric video ready to go the following day. The entire thing can be in bars available to sing along to by Thursday night, less than a week after the original first materialized.

After the producer’s recording is returned to Sunfly, it’s time for