Red Karaoke

» see redkaraoke.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Red karaoke opened on 3 april 2007, run out of spain by a company called planeta red, and it claimed a real first: the first online karaoke service in the world. The idea was simple and, for the time, ahead of itself. You picked a song, the lyrics scrolled over an instrumental in the browser, you sang into a microphone, and it recorded what came out so you could keep it or share it. Later it ran on phones and smart tvs as well.

It grew into something genuinely large. Over its life it counted around fourteen million users across more than ninety countries, in a stack of languages, a scale most people who never heard of it would not guess. It was free to start with a paid vip tier for the bigger song library, the standard shape for a service like this. For twelve years it kept the lights on.

Singing into a microphone for the internet was never a thing i went looking for. Red karaoke was a spanish product with a global reach that mostly passed me by, the kind of site you land on once from a search and never return to. What makes it worth a grave here is not my use of it. It is the way it died, and how familiar that death should look to anyone who followed the music web of the 2010s.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

Strip away the branding and red karaoke was a rights problem wearing a fun coat. Recording your own voice is free. The song underneath it is not: someone wrote the melody and the words, and a publisher controls both. A karaoke service has to license all of that, for every track, in every country it operates, and it has to keep paying while the users pay little or nothing. That the company held it together for over a decade at that scale was the impressive part.

~ the day it died ~

In july 2019 the founder posted that the service would close, and on 21 july it did. The reason he gave was not a lack of users, which it plainly had. It was the music industry: repeated vetoes from the publishers, deals that came close and fell through, offers to buy or invest that never completed because the rights holders would not clear the way. The same wall that had turned grooveshark off a few years earlier closed a karaoke site that had done everything by the book. You can build the software. You cannot build the permission.

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