There’s no denying that amateur music is hot right now, especially in the United States. Both NBC and Fox have competing television shows based around amateur karaoke (The Singing Bee and Don’t Forget the Lyrics, respectively), not to mention Fox’s yearly amateur music hit, American Idol. Last year Yahoo! bought karaoke site Bix and often the most popular videos on YouTube are covers of pop music.
So it’s no wonder that a site like FanCovers has launched to be a central location for videos of amateur artists belting out their favorite hit songs.
FanCovers is a pretty standard video sharing site that supports uploading, commenting, rating and embedding videos. The team is also working on some features specifically aimed at the music cover community, however, the first of which being the ability to attach chords and lyrics to any video.
I was actually rather impressed by the quality of the music thus far, and was happy to see people covering some of my favorite bands (Oasis, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Jack Johnson, Counting Crows, among others). Many talented musicians got their start playing covers, and some cover bands have even enjoyed a great deal of success — the Australian Pink Floyd Show even played to a sold out Royal Albert Hall in 2001.
