We like songs because we can sing along with them. Note the constant yet campy popularity of karaoke. The car singalong and the shower solos are irresistible, and music artists should know his better than anyone else. So how can musicians, the music industry, and game developers benefit from the pastime?

iOKi, A karaoke iPhone app developer, is finding a way. The song library for its karaoke iPhone app has recently grown to include Lady Gaga, and the app already has a handful of other song titles from popular artists. The $4.99 iPhone app has a series of songs from each artist, with direct access to its song library store to purchase and download additional titles.

The iOKi karaoke app also has the option to integrate your Twitter account, tweeting when you perform a karaoke song through the iPhone app. The social networking integration is handy for this type of an app, as it sends out links to both the app and the artist’s song itself.

Good promotion tactic for artists? As celebrities find ways to leverage Twitter for their own marketing purposes, a combined tool that promotes their content through a mobile karaoke app as well as social networks could been more viral activity around their content.

The popularity of shows like American Idol has carried over to its correlated iPhone app, which has a karaoke aspect to it. Other music apps such as Rock Band and Tap Tap Revenge are other ways of putting yourself into the musical experience, and their popularity also confirms the growth potential of an iPhone karaoke app.

So with a growing mobile gaming industry, those in the music arena may want to take a larger stake in social mobile gaming. It could offer another channel for monetization of artists and their content, beyond ringtones. Having more direct cooperation or apps designed specifically for social and mobile platforms coming directly from the music labels themselves could ultimately legitimize that form of monetization in the end.