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...reaction seems a tad overwrought, it may be because the magic isn't just about what up to 8 million viewers watch every Wednesday. It's also in the copycatting that Glee inspires off screen. With an assist from other corners of pop culture - including a karaoke contest on Oprah and NBC's first-ever a cappella-oriented reality show, premiering this month - Glee is inspiring its most hard-core fans to do some singing of their own. Once the butt of jokes everywhere except on a handful of college campuses, a cappella is making inroads all over...
Some Gleeks post their own live or lip-synched video renditions of the show's repertory on MySpace and YouTube: "Saw it on glee, and i had to rock out to it," posts MrJBVanilla, whose YouTube performance of Heart's "Alone" includes a lot of TV-worthy diva hand-flicks and head-flips. Fox - surprise - has encouraged the online tributes by touting Glee sheet music and sponsoring contests that reward the best amateur MySpace karaoke singers with prizes like a lesson from the Glee vocal coach...
Amateur adult singing groups, meanwhile, are reporting a crescendo of interest. Since June - following Glee's May premiere - the number of neighborhood songster gatherings listed on Meetup.com has nearly doubled, and participation has jumped 45% from 27,475 on June 1 to nearly 40,000 today. "[Glee] kind of inspired me," says recent Meetup convert Jessica Lin, 28, of Santa Clara, Calif., who enjoyed listening to a cappella groups as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and now gets together with half a dozen or so Silicon Valley buddies every week to sing. Meanwhile, over in Michigan...
Even veterans of the post-college singing subculture - which includes Microsoft's Baudboys, named after a modem speed, and NASA's Chromatics - say they notice a Glee factor. The show, they claim, is helping quash a cappella's rap as the province of dorks. For instance, when Vinyl Street, an a cappella group in Somerville, Mass., went out for karaoke on a recent weekend, members told a woman at the next table that they were there as a group - and found themselves a fangirl. "She was all excited," says co-founder Phil Dardeno, 29, a Boston University financial-aid planner...
...some singers note that the show has a downside. The more popular Glee gets, the more audiences expect real-life singers to sound like the singers on it. That's a tall order when many onscreen songs may be getting a boost from pitch correction and other professional sound-enhancement technology. For instance, as Vinyl Street member and die-hard Glee fan Joanna Aven points out, there are only six singers onstage in the Glee version of "Don't Stop Believin' " - which became a top iTunes download and hit No. 4 on the Billboard chart, surpassing Journey's 1981 original...