Several days ago I heard an announcement in a room on Paltalk that a given record company was going to hold auditions in the "Special Events lobby" at 4Anything.com on Wednesday night at 9:00 Eastern time.

I won't bore you with my difficulties getting into the site, but it turns out that 4Anything is Hearme, expanded. It's Hearme, complete with boot-outs and poor sound. 4Anything charges $4.95 a month membership fee, with the exception of free access to the Special Events lobby on Wednesday nights. They announced tht they would continue to have "auditions" for various record companies on subsequent Wednesday nights.

The "auditions" turned out to be nothing more than a general sound chat, attended by an executive of some recording company I never heard of, Usoft.

I got in, finally, at 10:00 Eastern, and between then and 11:00 or so there was, I believe, one passable singer. Be generous: two. The rest fell into several classifications: No-talent, bad, precious bad, and catastrophically bad. Mixed and matched with karaoke. Some simple playing of commercial recordings, which I didn't evaluate. The text-message traffic was almost entirely inane and childish, in an unreadable mess of different typefaces and colors.

Partly because the Hearme system doesn't keep track of who is on line next to sing, but leaves it to the moderator, there was much confusion occasioned by the periodic change of moderator. I had my name in the list for a LONG time, and finally gave up and left at about 11:15 Eastern.

Other than that, I had a good time.

Dave Oesterreich