Originally published on Youthradio.org, the premier source for youth generated news throughout the globe.
By the Mobile Action Lab
OAKLAND--Have you ever felt like singing your heart out, but you didn't have the moxie to perform your vocals in front of a live audience? There's an app that lets you karaoke to your favorite song with the option of adding Auto-Tune, which corrects your voice to stay on key. Only when you're sure you have a masterpiece do your friends get to hear it. The app's called StarMaker Karaoke with Auto-Tune, and here's one of the company's founders, Nathan Sedlander, demo-ing how it works.
Youth Radio invited StarMaker's other founder and CEO, Jeff Daniel, to our Oakland studios to bring us behind the scenes in the making of StarMaker. In addition to being potential users, we produce apps through Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab. So our young minds are always seeking lessons from the pros on how to make our products legit.
We get the appeal of StarMaker. It's fun to sing and share with your friends, put in a little Auto-Tune, and even get scored for your performance, which brings out the competitive spirit. But how did this tiny start-up company convince the major record labels to let users butcher the vocal tracks of hit songs by stripping off the original voice and replacing it with their own?
In this clip, Daniel says they had to convince the labels that they'd be building the next generation of lifelong true fans. "To come out with a good recording," he says, "It requires doing it a bunch of times and really getting inside your song." The idea, it seems, is to make sure the song also gets inside you.
Daniel says old business models in the music industry are dying. "Labels, publishers, artists, songwriters," he says, need to work with app developers and come up with new models. "They're not making any money selling records."
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