Karaoke to become a keynote beta feature of MySpace

In what could either be described as the next innovation in two-way media streaming or Simon Cowell's worst nightmare made real, the world's leading social network site is launching a karaoke service.

Today marks the launch of the first public beta of MySpace Karaoke, a service that enables members to sing along with instrumental tracks and share the results with other members.

A member interested in impressing others with his or her majestic or angelic vocals only needs a microphone to sing, record, and listen to music tracks from MySpace's music catalog. The user selects a music file to sing along with, then the service scrolls lyrics across the bottom of the screen. The member may than share the file by posting it directly to her MySpace profile, via bulletins, or via bookmarks for favorite traqcks. Up to ten songs can be stored through MySpace Karaoke at any given time, with further recorded tracks incurring a small surcharge.

MySpace Karaoke is powered by kSolo, a well known online karaoke service that was purchased by MySpace's parent company, Fox Interactive Media, in April 2006. After that time, its service was continually delayed due to licensing issues related to its catalog of 2,000 to 3,000 songs. MySpace officials had an increasingly difficult time trying to wade through legal issues for songs owned by foreign record companies.

The kSolo Web site, which has been live during the past two years, had not generated a large amount of traffic on its own.

Believe it or not, MySpace will not find itself alone in this new and burgeoning market. SingShot and Bix, owned by Electronics Arts and Yahoo, respectively, are two competing sites that have seen varying levels of success, and will be MySpace's biggest competitors.

The service is currently for US MySpace users though, but plans to expand to international versions moving forward. MySpace also plans on rolling out a video option, but has yet to announce a timeframe for rollout. At this time last year, the site launched its MySpace News service, but it hasn't been fully integrated into the site and does not appear to be a particularly popular service thus far.