A new television program being aired in Portugal called Atreve-te A Cantar (translates “Dare to Sing”), has adopted a new way to evaluate contestants’ singing talent in its karaoke-style game show. The show democratizes the contestant selection process in the same way as “The Price Is Right” by giving a microphone to each of the 100 members of the audience, and having the whole crowd sing a few bars of a pop song. Then, a computer program analyzes each person’s singing, and selects two contestants to battle against each other for up to $33,000.

The technology is called SAM (Musical Analysis System), and gauges how well tuned and in time a singer is. The system doesn’t work very well, and reminded me of video games Singstar and Karaoke Revolution, with the exact same setbacks. Ridiculously, SAM makes very dubious, unfair decisions almost every time.

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Online social networking site Myspace, has launched a karaoke service in Japan, expanding its musical reach to the nation loaded with lovers of the sing-along entertainment. MySpace Karaoke has logged more than eight million visitors since it launched in May of last year in Canada and the United States, and lets users post videos of themselves singing on the site.

“If you had told me years ago we would launch an online karaoke site in Japan, I would have told you it is like selling ice to the Eskimos,” said MySpace Karaoke general manager Nimrod Lev. “Boy was I wrong. It seems like the land of karaoke has nothing even close to that. We met with all the leading companies there and they loved what they saw.”

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