When kSolo and SingShot first emerged, there was a lot of buzz about them. Looking back, claims that they would become the YouTube of Karaoke are almost laughable.

An Alexa traffic comparison of the two services shows that the two websites are not getting much attention from Internet users.

Why is it that these services are failing to attract users? I don't think the reason is because the services are poorly constructed. You can try out a one or two week trial for each service, and internet coverage of the sites has generally been positive.

I think the problem with the two services is that both are trying to avoid the problem YouTube encountered of having outrageous expenses and no viable business model. They implemented their services as paid services from the very beginning, whereas YouTube suffered huge financial losses yet continued to explode in traffic and membership.

Studying the Alexa traffic graph, it seems like both services are having trouble retaining their trial users. The spikes in the graph show that both service are getting a good amount of coverage from major news sources and weblogs, but are failing to capitalize on the attention.

Paid membership clearly is not working out for these two services. Will adults with money have the time to sing and share karaoke? Will teenagers with all the time in the world have the money to pay the subscription fees? I believe that for either of these services to survive, a free membership plan must be implemented. It would have been better for them to follow YouTube's example by attracting armies of users first, and worrying about making money afterwards.