Singing Machine Has Been Bringing Awesome And Fun Home Karaoke Machines To People’s Homes Since 1982

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Singing Machine is a world leading consumer product company that specializes in home karaoke. They are a public company (traded on the symbol SMDM) that has been bringing awesome and fun home karaoke machines to people’s homes since 1982.

Below is our recent interview with Gary Atkinson, CEO at Singing Machine:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Singing Machine?

A: We sell to every single mass market retailer in North America (Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Amazon, Costco, etc.) and have our sights set on continued international growth. Last year we shipped over 1.4 million karaoke products and have done approximately $60 million in sales fiscal year-to-date.

Q: What kinds of products do you offer to your customers?

A: We offer the industry’s widest assortment of at-home karaoke products, ranging in price point from $49 to $300. Our goal is to spread the joy of music and bring the karaoke experience home to millions of customers. Our karaoke line is segmented into three categories: our legacy classic line of machines, our digital download line, and our new Wi-Fi karaoke machines coming out next year. We’re also excited about our new partnership with Antares Audio Technologies, the company that invented Auto-Tune. We are ready to release a new karaoke machine (called the Singing Machine Studio) to the market this summer that will feature authentic Auto-Tune pitch correction software. It will also feature studio-quality vocal effects such as vocal doubling, reverb, and virtually unlimited other vocal effect filters. The beauty of Auto-Tune software is that it automatically corrects a singer’s pitch in real-time. It’s the perfect way to make a novice karaoke singer sound better and feel more confident to pick up the microphone and belt out some tunes.

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Last year, we also launched a brand new line of products under our Singing Machine Kids brand. This new toy line is intended to be marketed to children that aren’t fully ready for the full karaoke experience. Our goal is to take advantage of our strong distribution channels and introduce our exciting and fun products to a new consumer demographic.

Q: How has the Toys “R” Us Bankruptcy affected your business?

A: Like most toy and youth related companies, we unfortunately got caught in the Toys “R” Us bankruptcy this year. We anticipate to write-off approximately $3.0 million dollars due to the bankruptcy which will get us totally cleaned up from a financial perspective. In our last fiscal quarter we already took a bad debt reserve for $2.0 million dollars, so we will need to take an additional million dollar reserve for our fiscal year ended March 31, 2018. The good news is that after this fiscal year, the effects of the bankruptcy will be totally in our rear-view mirror. We are also hearing that the other mass market retailers like Target and Wal-Mart are committing to expanding their toy departments to attempt to pick up the almost $11 billion in toy sales that TRU will leave behind. We feel we are well positioned to take advantage of this initiative.

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Q: What are some of the exciting initiatives you are working on?

A: Singing Machine has always historically been a hardware company selling karaoke machines. We realized a few years ago, that our brand had become the most trusted brand for karaoke and that there was a big opening to get into the karaoke music business! This is why a few years ago we started an initiative to leverage our brand name and start selling music with our machines (similar to the razor/razorblade concept). We now have a mobile streaming subscription App for the iOS and Android devices as well as a download store for karaoke songs that contains over 13,000 fully licensed and legal karaoke videos. We saw massive growth in our subscription music services last year and we expect to continue to see recurring revenue from the music become a larger and larger part of our business!

Finally, on the hardware side, we’re committed to international expansion to make Singing Machine a true global brand. We’re working on expanding into the basically untapped Asian home market (China, Japan) and the European and Australian markets!