Spotify karaoke? Looks like it’s coming.

Spotify, which started as a pure music streaming services, wants to become all things audio to everyone. The first big step in that direction was a dive into hosting podcasts. Next up? Karaoke.

Digital Music News has been keeping tabs on Spotify’s work on a karaoke feature. It would allow users to turn down the original vocals on a song and then sing along to lyrics displayed on the screen.

People who love to dig into patents noticed a “Karaoke Query Processing System” which works like this: “An electronic device receives an audio clip and performs a matching process on the audio clip. The matching process includes comparing at least a portion of the audio clip to a plurality of reference audio tracks and identifying, based on the comparing, the first portion of a particular reference track that corresponds to the audio sample. Upon identifying the matching portion, the electronic device provides a backing track for playback which corresponds to the particular reference track and an initial playback position of the backing track.”

So audio samples are matched with songs so you can do the karaoke thing? I think that’s what that means.

Other platforms have tried the karaoke thing (Amazon and Twitch among them) but have given up and closed down those initiatives. Tencent, the Chinese giant, continues to maintain an app called WeSing which generates over 10 million karaoke recordings per day(!!!). It currently has a market share of 77% of all online karaoke users in China.