It seems that just about every business niche is finding its way into the e-business sector these days. Grocery stores, investment firms, auction houses and . . . karaoke companies?

Yes, karaoke companies — an Ottawa-based karaoke company to be precise. Or rather, a financial software turned graphics software turned music software company called Vorton. At least, that's what they used to be called. The company is currently in the process of changing its name to eatsleepmusic.com, a name that matches the name of its Web site.

David Ballefeuille, eatsleepmusic.com's vice-president of business development, explains the Web site's purpose. "We are a destination for karaoke and music enthusiasts on the Web," he says. "We are targeting those folks on the Web that are interested in music, downloadable music, and in particular, those folks who are part of this whole phenomenon around karaoke."

The site offers a number of different things to satiate the appetites of raging karaokephiles, an audience that spent $25 billion worldwide last year. Free karaoke software is available for download, along with digitized songs in MIDI format for use with the software. There are also karaoke community areas with free Web hosting and various promotional programs.

Eatsleepmusic.com is the latest product of a group of former Corel Corp. staffers. "The principals here grew up at Corel Corp., and cumulatively we have 50 or 60 years of software experience," says Ballefeuille. "The guy who started the company was the number two in command when he left Corel about four years ago. He went off, he did his MBA, and through the process of doing his MBA he developed a financial application. When he left school he hired one of the guys from Corel, one of the engineers who became our CTO."

Other Corel people soon migrated over, including Ballefeuille himself, who was brought on to help work on such aspects as the company's OEM strategy. "Pretty quickly we had a consumer- oriented software development company and we expanded our product offerings to include not only financial applications but also digital imaging applications, which we kind of owed to our background working with a graphics developer like Corel," he says.

The company quickly exploited its people's experience with retailers and distribution, moving products to the channel rapidly in order to generating some revenue. With that well underway, they started looking for additional titles to sell, eventually settling on a Quebec City company called Tune 1000.

Tune 1000 had developed a way to create computer-based songs in a MIDI format and synch them up with lyrics. They had acquired the rights to recognizable content from folks such as Frank Sinatra, Elton John and Hootie and the Blowfish and created a karaoke-based application. "We saw a great opportunity not only in selling the application product, but in following that up with content sales. And we saw an extremely favourable type application that could be sold over the Internet," says Ballefeuille.

The company released the software one year ago, and launched a Web site. By May, company executives realized what a profitable venture they'd gotten their hands on and decided to sell off as many of their other product lines as possible so as to focus exclusively on their entertainment properties.

Although the initial impetus behind the Web site was to increase sales of the shelf-top version of the software, the company has started to generate a significant amount of money from the Web site as well. "We're generating revenue as a result of a couple of different opportunities, one of which is selling content, the other of which is selling advertising," says Ballefeuille.

While other dot-com businesses are spending piles of cash in the fight for online users, eatsleepmusic.com is taking a somewhat more backdoor approach by exercising its relationships with various hardware companies. For instance, they have commitments over the next two years for about 18 million units of Soft Karaoke Player, their desktop front-end, to be bundled with various OEM products. Creative Labs will be bundling Soft Karaoke Player in 10 different languages with the SoundBlaster Live card and Diamond Multimedia will be bundling the software with their cards as well.

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