Features on all aspects of karaoke
The story of the birth of www.karaokeinfo.co.uk
I would like to introduce myself, I am Joy Storey the owner of Karaoke Info. I am often asked how Karaoke Info aka known as KI came to be. This is the story of the birth of KI.
I will start at the very beginning; about 13 years ago I was on holiday in Wales on a day trip to Butlins with my family and wandered into a bar for some refreshment, the bar had Karaoke! After watching for about an hour my teenage daughter, her friend and I decided that we had enough courage to get up and sing together. I come from a family that has always sung together with siblings and relatives that play various instruments it has always been the norm. This was something different! We chose “Close to You” by the Carpenters and enjoyed it so much we went back the following week for another day trip!
That was my Karaoke beginning! I came back from holiday and my friend told me her Mum was doing Karaoke in the social club she ran and would I like to come, I was hooked!
I was soon out as many nights as I could, and began to make some very good friends, many of whom are now members of KI. My singing improved over the years though I will never set the world on fire with my voice. I am an average singer who stays well within her range ;-) having said that I don’t mind making a total fool of myself and have murdered many a good song! Karaoke is fun and I will applaud anyone who gets up and does their best! I sing for myself, no one else and if others like what I sing that is a bonus J
After being on the Karaoke circuit for a good few years I met a couple of guys who had decided to do Karaoke in the pub they had newly acquired. To start with they hired a Karaoke, it was very successful so they decided to buy an in-house system to enable them to go into it in a much bigger way. As they didn’t really have any idea of what to buy in the way of discs I offered to help them build their Karaoke book with what I knew would be popular tracks. This led me to my local Karaoke shop and the birth of our first web site.
My son Chris started to drive me to the shop on a regular basis, he hates Karaoke but loves computers and got chatting to the guys about email and web sites and though he had never done one before, he set about creating his first ever site for them. It proved very successful and lead to another shop asking for a site and then to others including a leading manufacturer wanting his services. I, in the mean time had gone to college and taken a NVQ in IT and began doing Karaoke books for various Pubs and KJ’s on a program that Chris created especially for the task, whilst helping him with the data entry etc for the various sites he was doing. The experience of doing the Karaoke Books for people also eventually led to the birth of our other popular site the on line Karaoke Book creator www.karaokebooks.com.
The sites proved to be very popular but I was often asked why wasn’t there a site for Karaoke venues etc. Chris and I did some research and found that though there were some local sites offering venue information there was nowhere to find all the information needed on one site. Chris and I thought it would be a nice hobby for me to spend a few hours on a week, how wrong were we! We sat down and put together a fun site offering Karaoke Hosts the opportunity to advertise themselves and their venues and were amazed at the response we got! Within days of telling Karaoke friends and sending a few emails to contacts found on various sites we had over a hundred members! The KI community had been well and truly born.
KI has gone through a good few changes since it’s official launch on 23rd November 2001, with over 2,000 members and an average of 13,000 hits a month it is now the voice and oracle of Karaoke in the UK, I would like to thank all our members for making it so popular we couldn’t have done it without you!
Joy
Karaoke Info > Articles :: The story of the birth of www.karaokeinfo.co.uk