Apple announced on Tuesday that its music streaming service Apple Music will launch a karaoke feature at the end of December.
The feature, titled Apple Music Sing, provides users with adjustable vocals to sing alongside the original vocal artists or take the lead.
Apple said in a press release that the service will launch a suite of over 50 playlists for the karaoke feature. Music that is not a part of the playlists will not be able to utilize the feature. However, it is likely that Apple will add more music to Apple Music Sing in the future.
Like most karaoke websites and services, Apple Music Sing will give users real-time animated lyrics that “dance to the rhythm of the vocals.” It will also feature background vocals to help users follow the songs and options to sing alongside others with multi-singer tracks.
While the streaming service has already been offering lyrics alongside songs, the timing of the lyrics display has been improved and lyrical highlights have been added in anticipation of the new feature.
“Apple Music’s lyrics experience is consistently one of the most popular features on our service,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats. “We already know our users all over the world love to follow along to their favorite songs, so we wanted to evolve this offering even further to enable even more engagement around music through singing. It’s really a lot of fun, our customers are going to love it.”
The tech giant holds tens of millions of songs in its music subscription service, which launched in 2015. Since then, Apple has been competing against other similar streaming services for market share, most notably Spotify, which launched in 2008. Other tech companies have created their own music streaming services including Amazon, which launched Amazon Music in 2014 and Google, which launched YouTube Music in 2015.
Apple Music Sing will be available worldwide on all compatible iPhones and Ipads as well as the new Apple TV 4K for Apple Music subscribers later this month. Users can download the Apple Music app on iOs and Android. Apple has not released information on whether the service will be available on third-party devices.
