February 13, 2007
Singing games make a noise
The sixth season of Fox’s hugely successful American Idol TV show is underway, with the contest proper starting tonight in Hollywood where 24 semi-finalists will be chosen.
This follows a month of televised auditions, notable for some extraordinary examples of awful singing, ridiculous dance routines and laughable costumes.
Much like your average karaoke bar, you might think, and Fox could have saved a lot of money touring the country by using instead kSolo, the online karaoke service it bought last year, to weed out the most entertaining singers.
It has yet to integrate kSolo into American Idol and one wonders what Electronic Arts will do with San Francisco-based SingShot Media, another online karaoke service that it announced it was acquiring yesterday.
SingShot will be part of The Sims division and EA said its technology and user-generated content would be applied to several different community projects within the company.
Video game publishers clearly want to extend into the online world and also see big money in titles that allow gamers to act out fantasies beyond being marines, space warriors, speedsters or sportsmen.
Activision’s acquisition of the company that makes Guitar Hero, the ideal game for air guitarists, helped it to a record holiday quarter. The consoles already have Sony’s SingStar karaoke game and Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution and Karaoke Revolution for hoofers and crooners.
Sales of music and dance games made up less than 5 per cent of the US market in 2006, according to NPD, but they rose 80 per cent on the previous year.
