A lot of people automatically sing in an American Accent; it's only been recently that regional accent around the UK have become popular to make songs more descript, I believe the Arctic Monkeys were a recent one where it all started coming from.

We were all taught to sing with an American accent. If anyone knows why i'd like to know.

Whit?

I think you can hear Charlene Spitiri's Scotish tone when she is singing - I can definately tell shes not American but I know what you mean....

Generally you would not be able to hear an accent but in some you can, People tend to mimic singers and also as said above some songs would not let you fit in the words along with the music if not sang in a particular accent / slang, voices tend to fit along with the tempo and also the genre of the music might determine which accent the song is sang in. I also would like to know why a lot of people tend to favour the American accent when singing. Strange.

Just try singing your favourite song, in your own reginal dialect!

Whether you can hear someone's accent or not when they are singing largely depends on the type of music they are singing. Pop music today is hugely influenced by the USA, so many people 'default' to an American accent when singing as this is the music that they are most used to hearing.

For the same reason, country singers often take on a Texan-drawl, rap artists have that bizarre black-American drawl, ya-na-wat-I-meeen, that is very popular in London schools. I aks [sic] you, why do they do that?

If you look at choral music though, theoretically, this should be done with received pronunciation, but younger choirs can struggle with this - in our choir, we have 'star' pronounced 'staaaaar' and car as 'caaaar', and 'to' as 'tew', that we regularly have to beat out of the kids.

You tend to notice when people step away from the expected accent for a particular song. When choirs perform pop music doing RP accents, it just sounds diabolical (Jennifer Rush's Power of Love is a prime example - "Sometimes I am frightened but I'm ready to learn..." sounds very different sung in casual American and received pronunciation!) like in the French & Saunders sketch where two opera singers sang Kylie's 'I should be so lucky'!

In other words, the accent you hear is usually a deliberate choice of the singer depending on how they want to be seen - mainstream (which means the accent appropriate to the type), RP (choral) or regional, which creates a particular feel to music - think about the Proclaimers shown above, but also the 'Manchester' sound of Oasis. Regional accents, though, are subjectively liked or disliked so tend to have less international appeal - very important if you are an international recording artist!

It used to be that Australian singers faked an American accent when they sang, but no more. Now I love to hear the broad Australian vowels when I listen to my favourite artists. However, you are correct that much of the accent is lost when singing, and this is because accent is not just vowel and consonant pronunciation. It is also inflection, timing, and syllable stressing. Those things are lost when singing in order to put the syllables into the tune.