Red Karaoke Launches in the U.S.; Listen to Me Butcher Bon Jovi

Online karaoke social network Red Karaoke is announcing their U.S. launch today. The service previously was offered in Spain and launched last year. I’ve got to be honest, the service is pretty much a hoot. There’s video and audio so you can basically record music videos. I was able to find a bunch of top artists in the system but unable to find British singer Rachel Stevens.

The only downside is that the music is in MIDI format which is a bit lame. Red Karaoke actually says this is a good thing and their MIDI files are professionally created. This is because Red Karaoke users can upload their own songs as well – their competitors only allow usage from a closed catalog.

In January 2008, Red Karaoke raised €2MM from VC firm Clave Mayor. They have 400,000 users (no word on active). The Red Karaoke business model is based on sponsorships and advertising. File storage is using Amazon S3.

Other karaoke services include: SingShot, SingSnap, kSolo and SingStar. They have also shared expansion plans to Japan and China later this year and into 2009.

What would make this more fun and probably produce better quality songs is if you could have two channels of audio. One channel would have the MIDI song you sing to and the other channel would have the real artist singing the song. Then you plug the artist into your ear.

Alright, here’s my first attempt at using Red Karaoke. Turn down your sound because apparently it recorded it very loud and it distorts it (yea that’s it!).

BLAZE OF GLORY – Red Karaoke