[ctadamsings]

I am happy to have found this post. I echo what was said earlier that karaoke is a great thing for singers who don't play instruments. I am in connecticut and I could karaoke as a patron every night of the week if I wanted to. There was a beer commercial that insulted karaoke when an actor called it a "cult" compared with the "religion" of music. Does anybody remember that? Karaoke is music and not anything less. Karaoke only can help the evolution of music, because, if anything, in our age of larger-than-life pop stars, it puts a more human stamp on the music and gives it to the layperson. It contributes to contemporary music's evolution because it allows singers who want to sing to practice, look at the lyrics more closely by reading the screen, and most importantly, to reach some kind of artistic exhange with an atleast partially listening audience. It sounds over-complicated for what usually is a light-hearted affair on both sides of the mike, but these things are done everytime a song is sung. Karaoke is the best of what music is to me and in its most accessible form. The beauty of karaoke is that it makes songs performable for the non-musician who wants that experience. There is nothing illegitimate in that. Even if that ficticious actor heard bad singer after bad singer, still, karaoke does not fall second in status to music, it is music.