Don't just listen, now "Sing Along" with Gaana.com's newest Karaoke feature; Implications

Online music portal Gaana has launched a karaoke feature, sing along, which is powered by T-Labs incubated Karaoke Garage's technology. This is the first attempt by any of the players in the music streaming industry to try and gamify the user experience. The game itself is quite addictive, especially if you're an enthusiastic singer. The service is available on a handful of songs; popular ones nonetheless.

However, it is the experience of playing the game which makes this game sticky. The game initially prompts you to allow it to access your device's mic and it prefers that you use earphones so as to not be affected by an audio feedback. The game itself is divided into two parts. The first one is the typical time count lyrics display that is common in most karaoke machines. The second part is the interesting part - it provides you interactive bubbles on a music sheet like display which indicates the song's actual pitch. It then maps what you're singing against the sheet and scores you based on that. If you're singing well, it will plot your voice on the bubble. The closer your voice is to the bubble, the higher the score you get.

A user doesn't have to log into Gaana via Facebook to play the game, which is great user experience. Once you've logged in, you can then share your score on Facebook as well as challenge your friends with the score for that particular board.

Implications 

This is a first of a kind integration with a music streaming service which even the likes of Spotify or

Last.fm haven't tried yet. The only such integration that comes to mind is MySpace Karaoke, which is quite popular. With Gaana's main revenue stream of the web property being advertisements, this product is an interesting addition as it promises greater engagement for its users on the site. Now, rather than running Gaana on a browser and working on another, the game will get Gaana longer viewership of the site from it's user, which is a good proposition for their advertisers.For the product itself, Gaana owns the digital rights to all the songs on the platform. Converting all these songs into a karaoke format compatible with the current system can be a laborious process. But, if the product is received well, then we might just see tighter integration of Sing Along with Gaana's database of songs, which might just give the likes of The Karaoke Channel Online and Sims On Stage a run for their money.

Will it? Why don't you try it and tell us what you think?