HOTSEAT
We managed to generate quite a lot of press as we had good connections in the media, and the word of mouth was astonishing. Word of mouth has been our most successful marketing channel since day one.
What makes Lucky Voice so successful? I think, fundamentally, people just love singing. It’s quite a primal human activity. This is just singing, but we package it up in exactly the right way – it’s you and your mates, we have great technology and everything you can think of that you want to sing and we’ll bring you drinks whenever you want.
How quickly did the other sites follow? Our second bar in Islington, London, opened around three years later, and then the third site, in Brighton, opened in the summer of 2009. Novus Leisure approached us in 2006 and said they really liked what we were doing and were keen to do something similar, so we began to work with them on a franchise agree- ment. We opened a Lucky Voice Tiger Tiger Manchester in 2007. We now have five fully-fledged Lucky Voice
franchises within Tiger Tiger bars across the UK in Cardiff, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds and Glasgow. After that we thought, lets find lots more of these franchisees. We quickly realised that there weren’t going to be too many operators who would be prepared to invest hundreds of thou- sands of pounds doing up their venue, so we decided to offer something a lit- tle further down the scale. We started licensing the karaoke software, which is very much the core of the expe- rience. We started off organically gathering a few clients here and there, but it has really started taking off in the last 12 months.
How are your plans for international expansion going? We signed a licensing agreement with Strike Bowling Australia in November 2012 to provide karaoke software to four of its venues in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. Strike Bowling is looking to grow its karaoke offer quite significantly. In April, we entered into a licensing
partnership with Irish entertainment complex Arena 7, in Donegal. A site at the complex is being converted into a private karaoke room with a
bar, featuring Lucky Voice software and we’re also talking to people in Dubai, Paraguay, France and the Czech Republic. The aim is to be the world’s de facto karaoke solution.
What does your software offer? We’ve created a piece of software called Lucky Voice Enterprise, which is wholly developed and owned by us. It’s essentially the software that creates the experience. From the cus- tomer’s point of view you have two screens: the touch screen where you search for and cue up songs, and the main screen where the lyrics appear. It’s also connected quite richly to our back-end, web-based, karaoke delivery platform. It updates itself all the time – it adds new songs, corrects spelling mistakes if there are any, and adjusts the visuals so that they tie in with special occasions such as Christmas, or with the venue. We can control all of this through our administration panel via the inter- net. It also reports back all the data – who has sung what, and when – and we can analyse that and look at what’s popular and what’s working and then share the findings with our clients. It’s a really good piece of kit.
The London nightclub Mahiki – frequented by Prince Harry and Kate Moss – has a Lucky Voice karaoke room 42 Read Leisure Management online
leisuremanagement.co.uk/digital ISSUE 3 2013 © cybertrek 2013
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