Karaoke tracks are ubiquitous and essentially free – on YouTube, on streaming music services, on iTunes.
On one side, this is great! Young musicians can sing with competent accompaniments, with appropriate style and musicality. (Musicality may very from track to track). Singers get the chance to sing with a full rhythm section – something they seldom get to do in high school or even college, when piano accompaniment is the norm.
But on the flip side, this can be seriously frustrating. First, singing with a karaoke track gives you none of the breath, the live music flexibility that a real musician can give you. If a young singer drops a beat, a good accompanist will catch up immediately. The karaoke tracks won’t. Even more important are the micro-examples of musical interaction that disappear when your accompanist is a speaker.
Second, I’ve witnessed fewer singers reaching for instruments when they want to sing, and more reaching for phones. In the long run, it’s a little disappointing that karaoke is always available, because if having ukulele or guitar or piano skills isn’t necessary for me to sing my song, it makes it very hard to justify the long hours of learning.
Like most interesting questions, there isn’t an easy answer. We have to live with the cognitive dissonance that having ubiquitous karaoke tracks is both good and bad.