Dolly Parton. Britney Spears. Madonna. One Direction. Kelly Clarkson. That's the opening lineup for Apple's newest party trick, and it reads like the playlist at every wedding reception where you've been dragged onto the dance floor.
The feature is called Selfie Sing, and it landed in the iOS 27.3 beta on November 4. Point your phone at your face, pick a song, and Apple Music films you performing it while the lyrics scroll by. You need no second app and no screen recorder, and no friend has to hold the camera and try not to laugh.
It's a small feature, but a revealing one.
Apple Music Selfie Sing, step by step
The mechanics are simple. As Engadget reported, you choose a track from a dedicated playlist, switch on the camera, and start singing. Lyrics move up the screen in time with the music, the way they do in a karaoke bar, minus the sticky floor.
When you finish, you can tweak how your voice sounds and how loud it sits in the mix. Then you save the clip or send it to friends.
Apple laid the groundwork in 2022 with Apple Music Sing, which quiets the original vocalist so you can step into the spotlight. Selfie Sing is the sequel with a camera. The first version helped you perform. The second helps you prove you did.
One detail from early testing is worth flagging. A developer and Apple watcher who goes by Aaron (@aaronp613) posted a first look on X and noted that Animoji doesn't work with the feature. He tried one anyway, he joked, to avoid posting a video of his own singing. Alas, that route is closed. Your actual face is required.
A short playlist, and a deliberate one
Here's the limit that matters most: Selfie Sing doesn't work with the whole Apple Music catalog. It comes with its own playlist, and only those songs are eligible.
Apple's description of that playlist leans on a familiar feeling: the song comes on and the entire room joins in. That's a smart pitch, and it's true. Nobody needs to read the lyrics to 9 to 5. The screen is there as a safety net.
The early list stretches from Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 to Britney Spears's ...Baby One More Time. In between sit Madonna's Like a Virgin, Clarkson's Since U Been Gone and One Direction's What Makes You Beautiful. Early lists often grow, but nobody at Apple has said how many songs will end up on this one or how fast it will expand.
Why fence it off? Apple hasn't explained, so this is informed guesswork. Lyrics that display in sync with audio are one piece of the puzzle. Videos you can share with the outside world are another, and music rights holders tend to care a great deal about what happens to a recording once it leaves the app that played it. A small, curated set of tracks is the easiest way to launch without a pile of exceptions. It also steers everyone toward songs that sound good when sung badly, which is its own kind of product design.
Still, a playlist this size will frustrate people fast. Karaoke is a hobby with deeply personal taste, and the person who wants to belt out a power ballad from 1987 won't be comforted by a Britney track.
Four ways to sound like someone else
Before you save a take, Apple lets you color your voice. The options named so far are Megaphone, Echo, Concert Hall and Studio.
They do about what the names suggest. Megaphone gives you a tinny, shouting-from-a-rooftop quality. Echo repeats you back at yourself. Concert Hall puts you in a big room. Studio is the polished option, for people who'd like their kitchen performance to sound like a record.
There's a volume control too, and it may be the most honest setting in the whole feature. It lets you decide how much of your own voice the world hears against the backing track. I suspect plenty of people will use it generously, in the downward direction.
Why a karaoke button is a bigger move than it looks
On paper, this is a novelty: a streaming service adds a camera mode and a few audio filters. Look at what Apple is doing with it, though, and the picture gets more interesting.
Streaming music has a retention problem that has little to do with the songs. Every major service offers roughly the same catalog at roughly the same price, so the fight is over what you do inside the app besides press play. Playlists, lyrics, and spatial audio have all been tried as answers. Letting you star in the song yourself is a different answer, because it turns a passive habit into an active one. Think of it as a gym membership that finally hands you a treadmill.
There's a second angle, and it's about where short music videos already live. People have been filming themselves singing along to songs for years, mostly inside other companies' apps, with those companies' tools, on those companies' feeds. Selfie Sing keeps the first half of that process (picking the song, singing it, polishing it) inside Apple Music. The sharing half still happens through the usual channels, since Apple's own description points to saving the clip or sending it to friends. Apple isn't building a rival feed. It's building a better starting point.
That's a modest ambition, and I think it's the right one. Apple has never been good at social networks, and the company seems to know it. Making a tool that other people's feeds will happily receive is less risky than asking anyone to start posting somewhere new.
The design also tells you who the feature is for. The target is the group at a house party who want a thirty-second clip to send to the chat, and the person hoping for a real karaoke night with a song book and a queue will be disappointed. The curated playlist, the fast effects, and the share button all point that way.
That raises a few open questions. Will Apple add songs on a schedule, or only now and then? Will the playlist stay tied to crowd-pleasers, or branch out into genres where the singing is harder to fake? And will rights holders see these clips as free promotion or as something to watch carefully? None of that is settled, and Apple hasn't said.
The karaoke bar, for what it's worth, has survived every technology that was supposed to kill it. It lasts because singing badly in front of people you like is fun. A phone feature can capture that only if it makes failure comfortable, and the volume slider is a good start.
What else ships in iOS 27.3
Selfie Sing isn't the headliner of this update. The same beta brings additional Siri features built on AI and a redesigned Health app to iPhones. Apple's new mobile software is expected to reach the general public sometime in December.
That gives the feature a few weeks of beta testing, which is usually when the rough edges show up. Watch for two things. First, whether the song list grows before the public release or arrives exactly as it is now. Second, whether the people who've been filming karaoke clips elsewhere actually move that step into Apple Music.
If they do, expect other services to copy it quickly. If they don't, Selfie Sing may end up as a December curiosity that a few families discover on a long holiday weekend, right around the time somebody puts on Dolly Parton and the whole room starts singing.