How to Organize Karaoke Books

[lvstephanie]

For those that don't know, I moonlight as a karaoke DJ for my karaoke business. I just started going through my karaoke books and trying to fix things that I've found wrong with it. But I've run into an issue as to how I want to organize my books, and I thought I'd get a little input from the FC community. Even if you don't sing karaoke but still like music, I'd still like to hear your input on this...

I have 2 flavors of books - one alphabetically by artist and the other alphabetically by song title; for this discussion, I'm only focusing on the Artist books... Currently the artist books are (for the most part) organized alphabetically by the artist's last name except for band names which are just by the band name (if the band name starts with an article like "the", "an", or "a" it follows the rest of the name so that the main first word in it's name gets sorted correctly). So I have entries like:

• Brown, Chris     Yeah x3                           15629
• Doors, The        People Are Strange          4309

Where I start running into issues is when an artist uses a pen-name, is a part of a common duo, or has their name as a part of the band. In all cases, I'd like to classify these as the name of a band esp. considering how mangled some of these get in the current book (eg "Daniels, Charlie, Band, The" for "The Charlie Daniels Band"). However sometimes an artist will be well-known as both the front of a band as well as by their solo music. For example, some songs are by "Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band" as well as under his solo name "Bob Seger". If I were to organize his songs using the band name as is, then they would be in a completely different part of the book than those songs under his own name, with the band being in the B's while his solo songs being in the S's (under "Seger, Bob"). And for those people that don't know how different songs are credited, they may fail to find a song when looking up under "Seger, Bob" but would have found it it they searched under the band name. So it would make more sense if I were to keep everything together.

Because I want to keep everything together and I dislike the current way the book is organized, I'm very tempted to just have all artists organized  as is without trying to change names to "Last, First" format, such that "Bob Seger" songs would be in the same area as "Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band". The only thing holding me back is that the regular people coming to our shows already know the format, so they may get confused if I changed the book as drastically as this would entail.

What do you think? Organize it in the way that I see makes the most sense or stick with tradition and keep solo artists as last name first?

[jmccaskill]

easy, I don't do karaoke in any form