About Social Karaoke
Social Karaoke is a free, browser-based group karaoke app. One person hosts a room on a shared screen, friends join from their phones with a 4-letter code, and everyone adds YouTube songs to a single queue that plays in order. No downloads, and no account needed to join.
Last updated: September 4, 2026
Why we built it
Karaoke is better when everybody gets a turn, and most setups quietly prevent that.
The usual options are a subscription service with a catalogue you rent, an app everyone has to install and sign up for before the first song, or one person hunched over a laptop taking requests and typing them into YouTube all night. That last one is the most common, and it is the worst: the person who owns the laptop stops being a guest at their own party and becomes the DJ.
We wanted the simplest possible version of the thing people were already improvising. Turn the screen you already have into a stage. Let everyone's phone be a remote. Put the queue where the whole room can see it, so nobody has to ask whose turn is next or shout a request across the sofa.
That is the whole idea. Everything else in the app follows from it.
What makes it different
Nobody owns the remote.
The queue is shared and live. Anyone in the room can add a song, and every entry shows who added it, so turn-taking sorts itself out without anyone having to police it.
The room decides when a song is over.
Skipping the current track is a majority vote of the people in the room, not a button one person controls. It is a small thing that changes the feel of a night: no one gets cut off mid-verse on someone else's whim, and nobody has to sit through a track the whole room has given up on.
Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.
Guests need a 4-letter code or a QR scan and a nickname. That is the entire barrier to entry, which matters when you are trying to get eight people singing before the mood passes.
The night keeps its shape.
Songs roll straight into the next one, hosts can promote a co-host to help run things, and the room archives afterwards into a read-only record of what was played and who added it.
The full mechanics are on how it works.
What it is not
Social Karaoke is not a licensed karaoke-track library, and it is worth being clear about that up front.
Services like KaraFun and Smule license their own recordings. You get a curated catalogue where every track is a proper karaoke mix, in a sensible key, with lyrics timed to the music. You pay for that consistency, either by subscription or per track.
Social Karaoke plays whatever karaoke, instrumental, and lyric versions already exist on YouTube. That is a far larger pool - the long tail is enormous, and there is usually something singable for almost anything - but the quality varies by uploader. Some tracks are studio-grade, some are a phone recording of a TV screen, and a handful of songs have no usable version at all.
That trade is deliberate. We would rather hand you the whole of YouTube for free than a smaller catalogue behind a paywall. If you want guaranteed studio-quality backing tracks for every song, a licensed service is genuinely the better tool, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If you want to get a room singing in under a minute without anyone paying or installing anything, that is what this is for.
We also wrote a guide to finding good karaoke versions on YouTube, because knowing what to search for closes most of the quality gap.
Built on YouTube
Search and playback use YouTube's official API. Songs stream from YouTube itself, and your use of the player is subject to YouTube's Terms of Service and Google's Privacy Policy.
We do not host, upload, or distribute any music. Everything you hear in a room is a YouTube video, played from YouTube, by whoever uploaded it.
Privacy
No ads, no ad tracking, and no third-party trackers.
The only cookie Social Karaoke sets is the essential one that keeps you signed in. Visitor analytics are cookieless, which is why there is no cookie banner on the way in. Guests who join a room without an account give us a nickname and nothing else. Room chat lives in the room and is not carried into the archive. Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
Who makes it
Social Karaoke is built and maintained by HoangCore, a full-stack development studio that builds web, mobile, and AI-powered products for other companies.
This one we built for ourselves. It started as the answer to a problem we kept running into at our own parties - one laptop, one person taking requests, nobody else able to do anything about it - and it turned into something we wanted to keep using. It is free because there is no reason for it not to be: it costs little to run, and a karaoke app that charges guests at the door defeats the point. Social Karaoke has been running since 2026, and we intend to keep it free and online.
If it breaks, we fix it. Email support@socialkaraoke.com with bugs, songs that will not play, or anything that should work better than it does.