The Karaoke Channel, a video on demand karaoke service that is available through cable in 30 million households, is launching its own online karaoke hub. The site offers a catalog of over 5000 popular karaoke songs, including songs available in a number of foreign languages.
If you’d like to try out The Karaoke Channel, the first 500 TechCrunch readers who follow these instructions will be able to access the site for 10 days:
Once registered and logged in, click on MY ACCOUNT (Top right
corner) and enter the promo code in the PROMOTION space (try both codes, each are good for 250).273N-7YL0-JDJE
ELIQ-8BD2-QDF0
To gain access to the site’s full catalog, users will have to become paid members. Membership fees run around $10 a month or $100 a year, with a $15 24-hour membership available (the site advertises that these are intended for “karaoke parties”). There’s also a free plan, but this only grants access to 100 of the site’s songs.
For each song that they have access to, users can play back and record their songs through the site’s Flash-based media player. The site also includes community features that allow users to make friends and rate and view the most popular (and hopefully talented) singers.
Unfortunately, the site places a heavy emphasis on becoming a paid member and its sharing functionality is very restrictive. It’s understandable that users are asked to pay for the privilege of using these licensed karaoke songs (which are often expensive to purchase elsewhere), but the site also restricts them from listening to whole recordings performed by other users (you can only hear brief samples). This is especially frustrating when listening to the “Hall of Fame” songs, and only getting 30 second snippets.
There also doesn’t seem to be any way to share a song with a non-member. Karaoke communities are fun because you get to strut your stuff to a wide audience – if you can’t link your friends (who probably aren’t members) to your performances, the site loses most of its value.
The site plans to integrate more robust sharing in the near future, but until then it will have a tough time competing with other karaoke sites like MySpace Karaoke.
The $15 24 hour membership sounds great! It’s definitely better than spending $15-40 a person in NYC.
Yes, it’s definitely worth checking out
Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing, sing a song…………!!!!!!!!! – sesame street.
$10 monthly or $15 daily, how does that work?
Currently, by far the best karaoke site out there is http://www.singsnap.com. It has a free service, as well as a $7/month option for better features, more songs, stereo recording, no advertising. Plus you can listen to the full tracks even as a guest.
I’m anxious to try out this though to compare between the two.
Here’s one of my recordings (notice i can share and you can listen without restriction): http://www.sing...snap/r/b3f6cd3f
Charles: I believe the daily option would be for those nights when you have a few friends over and don’t want a monthly commitment.
Tried it, pretty cool. Website streams very well, no hickups, and the interactive lyrics and screens are impressive, lots of possibilities for customization. Pricing seems competitive. Looks like its all legit too. Are the other karaoke sites legit? Copyright-and-royalty-wise?
All in all, I put it on par with other karaoke sites for application and back-end, and put it on a notch above for design and usability.
I know singsnap.com is legit, or at least they give the impression of legitimacy. About 6 months ago they had to remove a lot of songs (and recordings created by members) due to, apparently, some licensing issues.
Post from Trevor the President:
http://www.sing...m/topic/b12c515
It’s hard for me to believe that Singsnap is legit ! They have songs from “The Eagles” and everybody knows that it’s impossible to have the licences for their songs. Just look at Itunes, even this site doesn’t have “The Eagles” songs.
I’m a bit of a karaoke addict and have tried it all (bars, machines, online).. Singsnap does have a good web community going but I’m happy I’ve found The Karaoke Channel, I like the look and feel of it and it seems easier to find and record songs than on other sites. I’ve hosted a few party nights with friends and we’ve had an absolute blast – and you’re right $15.00 for a night of karaoke is cheap in any city (although I’ve gone for the monthly service ‘cause I love a night of singing my heart out even if I’m alone in my apartment!).
Brian – you have such a great voice – there are lots of country songs on The Karaoke Channel’s site for you to sing! When you try it out I recommend switching to Full Screen – check out how nice the lyrics are and the backgrounds that the lyrics appear on are so much fun!
I signed up for the Beta (thanks techcrunch) and played around with it. The first thing I noticed is that the music and vocal recordings sometimes get out of sync, especially when using a USB connection from my mixer to the computer. They have some work to do in that regard. Also, because its all flash, you can’t use the #1 used button on the web, the back button. That’s a pet peeve of mine. If you want to browse songs you literally have to go back to the top and drill back down. Also, they make you double-click some things, single click others. They have a great deal of work to do in fine tuning their usability.
I did see the full screen lyrics display. I think they have the best presentation for full screen lyrics that I have seen.
All in all, i can see this being big for the one-nighters, but the die-hard recorders will stick with SingSnap.
just seems silly to me that a karaoke site would launch with multiple language libraries but not include Japanese, Korean or Chinese, in other words excluding 99% of all die hard karaoke fans…