Cloud Karaoke Songbooks

If you want to host your karaoke songbook online, there are several sites that offer this service. I haven’t found a free one, so I imagine this is something more useful to a professional karaoke host who is earning revenue. Since I just use my karaoke system for my own parties and those of friends and family, I couldn’t justify spending $10 or more dollars every month on an online songbook service.

Instead, I have installed a WordPress plugin that allows me to put a database table in a page and make it searchable, sortable, and very friendly to the users. Because it is WordPress, it is also compatible with the browsers on most smartphones and tablets, so my friends can use their own devices to find songs they want to sing either before or during the party.

I also wanted a way people can digitally submit their song requests. Some of the online songbook services offer that too, but I opted to use another WordPress plugin for this. I customized fields in the a contact form plugin to make it work as a song request submission form. I use a special email account I set up just for song requests so it is easy to find them during a party. You can see it in the sidebar on the right. This will help me keep track of the order I receive requests in and also help prevent one from being misplaced.

I’ll still have at least one printed songbook and some paper for written requests at parties, just in case, but I plan to primarily use the online systems I set up. I’ll post some instructions soon on how I did this for those of you who want to replicate it.

If you really just want to use an established online songbook service, I’ve listed some below. Although I have looked at their features, I have not personally used any of these. Note that the links below all lead to external sites owned by other people. I will add to this list as I find others. Where possible, I’ll post the pricing for each, but note that these prices were accurate at the time of this posting and may have changed since then. I have no control over their pricing and will try to update these periodically, but you should check with these sites to see what their current prices are.

• SongbooksDB – This one offers an online songbook database and online song request submissions. As of 02/07/2015, the lowest cost here is 11.99 monthly for the service that offers only the online songbook with advertising. Their highest priced option is $29 monthly and includes both the online songbook database and online song requests with no advertising.
• Songbooks Live! This service offers only the online songbook database, but is pretty reasonable at only $19 annually (as of 02/07/2015.)