Mobile Karaoke, Anyone?

Posted by: Olga Kharif on November 08

This summer, Grammy Thailand, a mobile carrier, had launched a mobile karaoke application. You can play a song over your phone’s speakerphone and sing along. Better yet, you can record your own voice singing the tune, overlay the recording over the music and send the whole thing to your friends.

This could be just the ticket for the next American Idol (or not).

Indeed, a lot of new mobile applications that have started popping up allow people to interact with music stored on their cell phones. Some others let users create their own ringtones (sure, go ahead and embarrass yourself). Others allow you to create musical voicemail greetings. Many such applications, such as mobile karaoke, will likely hit the U.S. market in 2006, says Jerry Skurla, director of marketing at NMS Communications, which helped Grammy Thailand provide the karaoke application to its users.

What I am wondering about is, How many people would want to sing along to a cell phone? Sure, karaoke is all the rage in Asia. But can such applications take off in the U.S., where karaoke and similar applications aren’t huge? Even music cell phones don’t seem to be taking off here as quickly as they did in Europe. What do you think?