Leadership Series: Arnaud Studer

Arnaud Studer didn’t want to go to karaoke. 

On a trip to Tokyo in 2011, his friends talked him into it, and over two weeks they went back seven times, sometimes for five hours at a stretch. 

A year later, back in Paris, they couldn’t find anywhere to do it again. So he built one.

That became BAM Karaoke Box, which now runs 10 venues across Paris, Bordeaux, Madrid and London, plus a franchise inside a hotel in Chamonix. 

Its London site in Victoria is the biggest karaoke venue in Europe at around 10,000 sq ft and 22 rooms, and was recently named the best karaoke venue in the world.

In this episode of our Leadership Interview Series, Krishnan talks to Arnaud about turning karaoke from an uncool night out into a premium brand. 

They cover why his Paris business plan got the drinks spend completely wrong, why getting a licence in London was harder than in France, and how a supplier’s overnight 10x price hike pushed him to build his own karaoke software company, Song Laboratory. 

He also explains how new songs can be in the system within 24 hours, what it takes to look after staff working until 3:30am in Madrid, and where BAM is heading next (more of Spain and London, and early plans for the US).

𝘼𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩𝘽𝘼𝙈𝙆𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙤𝙠𝙚𝘽𝙤𝙭 & 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙎𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙨𝙇𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙮

BAM Karaoke Box: premium private-room karaoke company founded in Paris in 2013. It runs 10 venues across Paris, Bordeaux, Madrid and London, plus a franchise inside a hotel in Chamonix. 

The Songs Laboratory:  BAM’s sister company. It makes karaoke content and the software that runs it, and sells both to BAM and to other operators. Its software now runs in BAM’s own 100 or so rooms and another 300 to 400 karaoke rooms, mostly in France, which makes BAM fully vertically integrated.