AllThingsD » karaoke

Play "American Idol" From the Comfort of Your Phone With StarMaker Karaoke App (Video)

Liz Gannes — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:30:06 +0000

We are living in the future, and the future can be pretty darn fun.

A neat karaoke iPhone app called StarMaker will let you lay down your voice to today’s hottest pop songs, with a little — or a lot of — help from instant Auto-Tune. Then you can submit your track to the greater StarMaker community, and win prizes for your natural-born and/or computer-aided talent.

Due in part to its founders’ history doing brand promotions in the music industry, the seed-funded, 10-employee StarMaker Interactive already has music licenses from the major labels, including EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal. The company’s current catalog isn’t huge — about 500 songs — but it contains Justin Bieber and Rihanna, plus karaoke favorites like “Baby Got Back.” Tracks, which come with timed lyrics, instrumentals and guide vocals within the app, cost less than a dollar each.

StarMaker CEO Jeff Daniel showed off how his flagship app works in a video interview this week, and he didn’t even blink when I asked him to sing for us.

[ See post to watch video ]

Daniel isn’t sharing too many usage stats just yet, but StarMaker is one of the top App Store free music offerings, with millions of recordings made per month, he said. Users tend to upload the same song over and over again as they perfect their performance, which Daniel described as a show of true fandom that he thinks will help continue to convince labels that licensing music to StarMaker is a good idea.

StarMaker gives out prizes every two weeks, based on user votes, with a current contest sponsored by Mike and Ike and Hot Tamales candies. Upcoming features will make StarMaker feel more like a game, with user feedback and scores on vocal skills, Daniel said.

Users can’t yet download their masterpieces as MP3s, but they can stream them and share them on Facebook and Twitter. (Here’s a link to a user profile page with a particularly good rendition of “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” that the StarMaker folks recommended.)

San Francisco-based StarMaker is seed funded by investors including Qualcomm Ventures and Grupo Reforma Ventures.

I also recently interviewed another karaoke start-up called Singboard, which incorporates official music videos.

Singboard: Karaoke Without the Cheesy Videos

Liz Gannes — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 23:00:29 +0000

Singboard is a soon-to-launch start-up that dynamically creates mashups to create an online karaoke experience.

According to Singboard co-founder Ray Chan, karaoke on the Web is usually not ideal because it involves cheesy made-for-karaoke videos featuring nameless nobodies instead of real singers. Plus, as much as it’s fun to gather friends around a computer or in a Google+ Hangout, there’s a lot more to be done to make online karaoke social, Chan said in a recent interview at 500 Startups in Mountain View, Calif., where his team is about to finish the Accelerator program.

[ See post to watch video ]

Singboard mashes up official music videos, karaoke tracks and song lyrics. It doesn’t license any of the parts, because it keeps the streams intact as it layers them together to form a whole, Chan said.

Chan said he and his co-founders are building tools to help users to record themselves singing karaoke and then overlay their own voices onto official music videos — which he thinks is way cooler and more likely to be shared than amateur Webcam karaoke video. Singboard will also emphasize singing and sharing videos with friends.

Online karaoke has been done many time before — even Myspace had a karaoke product — but Chan argued that the combination of official music videos and a more social experience can set Singboard apart.

In the video embedded above, Chan gave us a demo using Justin Bieber’s “Baby” but said his own favorite song to sing is Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie.” The first version of Singboard should be released before the end of August, he said.

Prior to Singboard, the same team had started work on a group photo-sharing app called vvall.

Viral Video: Undercover Karaoke With Jewel

Kara Swisher — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:15:54 +0000

The set-up for this new Funny or Die video, described thus, is flawless:

“Jewel, disguised as a mild mannered businesswoman, drops by a local karaoke bar and performs some of her classic songs to a completely dumbfounded audience.”

It’s been so popular, with 2.8 million views so far since it debuted six days ago, the concept might even become a new reality television show.

Oh, just watch the video:

Undercover Karaoke with Jewel from Jewel

Sirius XM: Stern Confirms Interest in "American Idol"

Eric Savitz — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:08:15 +0000

Howard Stern told listeners this morning that he is considering leaving Sirius XM (SIRI) to become a judge on American Idol, according the TheWrap.com.

“There’s not a better job on the planet than judging that f—ing karaoke contest,” Stern said, the site reports. “It might be possible, we’ll see,” he said, adding: “They’d have to pay me a ton of dough because I already make a ton of dough.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Yahoo Content Model Gets Remixed as Product Development Is "Globally" Centralized

Kara Swisher — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:45:48 +0000

Will Yahoo’s media properties fall flat with sweeping new changes that are afoot that will drastically change the way the company bakes its content offerings?

Or will the ability to have a single, highly scaleable, centrally developed architecture make the media programming Yahoo delivers more responsive and flexible in the era of fast-twitch bloggers (all while cutting costs)?

According to many sources inside and outside the company, product development for Yahoo’s heavily trafficked media operations–including its powerful News, Finance and Sports sites–is set to be moved under Ash Patel, who is EVP of the company’s Audience Product Division.

The move has been supported by U.S. Audience head Jeff Dossett, who came to Yahoo (YHOO) from Microsoft (MSFT). He replaced former media head Scott Moore, who is about to take over content efforts at Microsoft.

The centralization of product development for the media properties was much resisted by Moore and by many managers within Yahoo’s media group, who are worried and unhappy about the upcoming change.

Sources told BoomTown that it is one of many changes coming to the unit, which is likely to soon get a dramatic management restructuring too.

Under the new configuration, which sources said had been approved by CEO Carol Bartz, media products–but not editorial programming–will be developed “globally” at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ in Northern California.

Until now, such development has been mostly done by individual media properties, many of which are located down south, in Santa Monica.

But a move to global product and platform development has been steady at Yahoo for a while. The move to change how media are made was initially championed by former President Sue Decker, but has continued to move forward after she announced in January that she planned to leave the company.

As with most things, there are pros and cons to the new approach.

The pro argument posits that centralizing the product development of a Yahoo media offering drives efficiencies, saves money, eliminates redundancies and accelerates growth across the world.

Said one on-the-bandwagon exec to me in an email: “This is a good and smart plan to achieve better balance between the benefits of a globally scalable product development and the need for regions to be very close to and responsive to local user and advertiser needs…there is huge upside (in user engagement and monetization) that will come from a deeper focus on editorial, content (original and licensed) and programming within the properties and most importantly across the network.”

Those who do not like the idea think it is wrong to separate the development of a product from the programming because the two are intricately dependent and need to be tweaked delicately.

In addition, they argue, it makes Yahoo media offerings, which have been largely successful, less unique and more dull.

“It’s like separating the cook from the recipe and ingredients,” said one person who thinks that it’s very hard to separate product from the content online. “You could end up with a really bad cake.”

Translation: I don’t think that I can take it/’Cause it took so long to bake it/And I’ll never have that recipe again.

Whatever the case for Yahoo’s media properties, I think we can all completely agree that this Donna Summers rendition of “MacArthur Park” remains as fresh and delicious as ever (plus it’s a karaoke video version, so feel free to sing along):