I haven’t been to KTV (or karaoke) in Shanghai in a while, and damn… things have really changed.

KTV in Asia is a pretty different experience than what you see in the west. In the west, there is usually one KTV machine, and you generally sing in front of a crowd of friends and strangers in a bar or restaurant.

In Asia, this is almost unheard of. Generally, you rent private rooms by the hour. These rooms are usually pretty swanky looking with leather couches, mood lighting, big LCD TVs, and a touch screen KTV machine with a selection of basically any song or artist you can think of. Throw in a few microphones and a button to ring for room service, and you’re set.

Even cooler is that some places don’t mind if you bring your own booze too – this time I just ran down to the Family Mart and grabbed a few cans of Tsingdao.

In Japan, a lot of people just hang out in KTV rooms to sleep off a night of drinking (like we did last year) before catching the subway home in the morning, as it’s cheaper than a taxi.

I’ve never liked karaoke in the west, but the times I’ve gone in China and Japan, it’s impossible not to have a good time with a few drinks and some friends.

Well, we recently went to Haoledi (one of the two big KTV chains in Shanghai, the other being Party World/Cash Box) to have a few beers and sing some 80s songs.

But damn… how things have changed! Leave it to the 2010 World Expo and Haibao to ruin the party. Because of copyright laws that Shanghai has now decided to enforce, KTV clubs are now charged royalties for all of the music/videos they wish to play.

(To be fair, I think they were always charged royalties, but now these charges are actually being enforced.)

Unfortunately, rather than pay huge royalty fees, most KTV proprietors decided to just slash their selection of available music – especially western music. The results is that you’re lucky to find anything that you’ve even heard of, let alone can sing.

I guess it’s a win-win situation for the most part. The majority of KTV customers only care about the Chinese music selection, and the owners only care about not having to pay hefty fees. This would explain why there has been little uproar.

But my ability to live vicariously through John Parr or the Scorpions has now been replaced with humming along to Jay Chou songs, and singing the odd Chinese character on the screen I can read.