Karaoke

• 1. Introduction

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  Karaoke earns a man an Ig Nobel Peace Prize. In 2004, Daisuke Inoue was handed the tongue-in-cheek award for inventing karaoke, praised for giving people "an entirely new way to learn to tolerate each other." It was a fitting honor for something that began as a nightclub favor and grew into a market estimated to be worth nearly $10 billion. Karaoke is interactive entertainment where people sing along to pre-recorded accompaniment using a microphone, usually in nightclubs and bars. The music is an instrumental version of a well-known popular song. Lyrics scroll across a video screen, often with a moving symbol or changing colour to keep the singer on time. How does a coin-operated box turn into a global pastime? Why do two men, one Japanese and one Filipino, both claim to have invented the machine? And how did singing in a bar end up linked to a string of killings in the Philippines? The answers run from a Kobe drinking district to taxicabs, video games, and the cloud.

• 2. Contested Origins

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  The word karaoke is Japanese and was first attested in 1977, yet who built the first machine remains controversial. Credit usually goes to two people, depending on the source: Daisuke Inoue of Japan or Roberto del Rosario of the Philippines. Neither man profited significantly from the worldwide surge that began in the 1980s. The money flowed instead to later machines made by larger Japanese corporations.

  Only del Rosario holds a patent on his machine, which complicates the story further. Other people have also claimed to have invented karaoke-styled machines at various dates. The machine is, at its core, an aggregate of existing technologies built on the older idea of the sing-along. That makes independent invention by several people across several years entirely plausible.

  Sing-alongs themselves predate any device, having existed as long as singing has. From 1961 to 1966, the American network NBC carried a karaoke-like series, Sing Along with Mitch, hosted by Mitch Miller, which superimposed lyrics near the bottom of the screen for home viewers. The key difference between karaoke and a sing-along is simple: karaoke removes the lead vocalist. That single absence is what later inventors would chase from opposite ends of Asia.

• 3. The Kobe Bandleader

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  In 1971, in the city of Kobe, a nightclub musician named Daisuke Inoue built what he called the "8 Juke." Inoue was a bandleader, drummer, and Electone keyboardist who specialized in leading sing-alongs in Sannomiya, Kobe's entertainment district. In 1970, he and six bandmates played in drinking establishments to accompany middle-aged businessmen singing traditional Japanese songs.

  A prominent client sparked the idea by asking Inoue to play for him on an overnight trip to an onsen. Unable to go, Inoue handed over a tape of his accompaniment instead. Recognizing the potential, he imagined merging pre-taped accompaniment with a jukebox. Lacking the skills to build it, he commissioned 11 home-made machines through a friend who owned an electronics shop. Each unit cost around $425 and held an amplifier, a microphone, a coin box, and a car stereo running specially made 8-track tapes, fed by ¥100 coins.

  Starting in 1971, Inoue loaned the machines to establishments for free in exchange for a share of the monthly earnings. His first 8 Jukes failed to take off in Sannomiya's snack bars, so he hired hostesses to sing on them conspicuously, which sparked interest. This caused friction with his fellow musicians, who saw the boxes stealing their customers. Around four years in, profits improved and he hired professional musicians, rented a studio, and recorded songs in keys easier for casual singers, adding rudimentary reverb to mask their flaws.

  By then his rented units had grown from eleven to around 25,000. Club owners from Kobe carried his machines to Osaka, which became the birthplace of the karaoke boom in Japan. Inoue never patented the machine. Earning about half a million dollars a year, he lost interest and handed the company to his brother before the larger corporations moved in.

• 4. The Filipino Patent

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  Roberto del Rosario, a Filipino entrepreneur and piano manufacturer, claimed in 1975 to have invented the first karaoke-type machine, the "Sing-Along System," or SAS. It packed an amplifier, a speaker, a single or double tape deck, an optional tuner, and a microphone mixer with reverb and echo into one portable cabinet. It had no video, but it came with songbooks of lyrics. Its cassette tapes of instrumental songs would become widely known as Minus-One.

  The SAS began life in the late 1960s as a teaching device for students at del Rosario's Trebel School of Music. He refashioned it for amateur and recreational use between 1975 and 1977. Unlike Inoue's coin-operated 8 Juke, the SAS took no coins. Del Rosario was a pianist himself and played in the amateur Executive Combo Band, made up mainly of politicians and businessmen. His firm, Trebel Industries, was the leading maker of pianos and harpsichords in the Philippines.

  His inventing did not stop at the SAS. In 1972 he built the "One-Man Band," an acoustic piano that plays a full orchestra accompaniment automatically. He also created the "Piano Tuners' Guide," an electronic push-button tuning device, and "Voice Color Tapes," multiplex tapes matched to a specific vocal range. He patented the Sing-Along System, with patents issued in 1983 and 1986, and is recognized as the sole holder of a karaoke-system patent after winning an infringement case against a Chinese company in the 1990s.

  Recognition came even as profit did not. In 1985 the World Intellectual Property Organization awarded del Rosario its Gold Medal for Best Inventor for the SAS. He was elected to the executive board of the International Federation of Inventors' Associations. His lobbying in the Congress of the Philippines led to Republic Act No. 7459, the Inventor and Inventions Incentives Act of 1992.

• 5. Other Claimants

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  Shigeichi Negishi, a Japanese engineer who ran a consumer electronics assembly business, claimed to have built the first karaoke-styled machine in 1967. He went on to mass produce coin-operated versions under the brand name "Sparko Box," arguably the first commercially available karaoke machine. It played 8-track tapes of commercial instrumental recordings, with lyrics supplied in a paper booklet.

  Distribution troubles ended the run quickly, and Negishi ceased production of the Sparko Box shortly after launching it. Though some credit him as the first to automate and commercialize the karaoke sing-along, he never patented his invention. Negishi died in 2024.

  Toshiharu Yamashita offers yet another claim from the same era. A singing coach by trade, in 1970 he sold an 8-track playback deck paired with a microphone for sing-alongs. His device places one more contender alongside Inoue, del Rosario, and Negishi in a field where, by the 1980s, the larger corporations would soon overtake them all with LaserDisc technology.

• 6. From LaserDisc To The Cloud

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  Shortly after the LaserDisc arrived, Pioneer began offering Video Karaoke machines in the 1980s, capable of showing lyrics over an accompanying video. In 1992, a scientist named Yuichi Yasutomo built a networked karaoke system for Brother Industries, serving songs in MIDI format over phone lines to modem-equipped machines. The technology swept Japan. By 1998-94% of karaoke was sung on networked machines, making it arguably the first successful audio streaming service and a tool for real-time analysis of song popularity.

  Taito's X2000, introduced in 1992, fetched music over a dial-up telephone network, and its smaller size and continuous updates gradually displaced traditional machines. Karaoke Direct, an Internet division established in 1997 and serving the public online since 1998, released the first karaoke player supporting MP3+G. In 2010, the earliest cloud-based streaming device, KaraOK!, was released by StarHub on the 14th of January, licensing songs from RIMMS.

  Subscription services followed the cloud. Recisio, founded in 2006 as downloadable software, became the online service Karafun in 2011. Singa launched in 2015 for Android, iOS, and web browsers, joining services like Smule and Starmaker. In August 2017, ROXI launched in the UK and then the US, with a singalong feature called Sing with the Stars and a Wii-style controller with a built-in microphone. By July 2023, the YouTube channel Sing King Karaoke reached 11 million subscribers, the largest karaoke channel on the platform.

• 7. Singing Through A Screen

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  Karaoke Studio, released for the Family Computer in 1987, was the earliest karaoke-based music video game. Its limited computing power allowed only a short catalog, so karaoke games stayed near collector's-item status until higher-capacity DVD formats arrived. Karaoke Revolution, built for the PlayStation 2 by Harmonix and released by Konami in North America in 2003, scored a single player on pitch, timing, and rhythm. It spawned follow-ups including Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2, a Party Edition, and Karaoke Revolution Presents: American Idol.

  Sony Computer Entertainment Europe answered with SingStar, especially popular in European and Australasian markets. Other singing titles include Boogie, Disney Sing It, the Guitar Hero series starting with World Tour, Lips, the Rock Band series, and UltraStar. An Xbox Live app named Karaoke, made by iNiS and powered by The Karaoke Channel, launched on the 12th of December 2012 using Unreal Engine 3.

  Under the hood, a basic karaoke machine combines a music player, microphone inputs, a way to alter pitch, and audio output. Most machines electronically shift pitch so amateurs can pick a comfortable key while keeping the original tempo. Low-end systems try to strip vocals from ordinary CDs using an Out Of Phase Stereo technique, subtracting the left channel from the right because vocals usually sit in the center. The crude method often fails, leaving reverb behind and removing centered instruments like the snare and bass, which is why newer methods based on the fast Fourier transform compare individual frequencies instead.

• 8. Rooms, Cabs, And Consequences

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  In Asia, the karaoke box is the most popular venue: a small rented room with karaoke equipment offering an intimate atmosphere. In South Korea these are called noraebangs, a compound of norae, meaning song, and bang, meaning room. In mainland China and Taiwan the establishments are called KTV, short for karaoke television, with Taiwan's biggest chains including Partyworld Cashbox, Holiday KTV, and NewCBParty. Singing is so woven into Korean social life that people are persuaded to perform at virtually any occasion, and some noraebangs cater to those who want to sing alone.

  Karaoke also left the building entirely. Taxicabs with sound systems and microphones appeared in South Korea in the 1990s. In 2003, Chinese maker Geely drew press for fitting its Beauty Leopard with a karaoke machine as standard equipment. London later ran karaoke taxis in the 2010 Kabeoke fleet, and Tesla's newer cars carry a "Car-a-oke" app. The mini karaoke box, a soundproof booth the size of a phone booth for one or two singers, became popular in East Asia.

  The pastime has a darker side that made headlines. In the Philippines, at least half a dozen killings of people singing "My Way" led newspapers to label the phenomenon the "My Way killings." Some bars refused to play the song, and some singers refused to sing it among strangers. Violent reactions to karaoke have also been reported in Malaysia, Thailand, and China. The pursuit of records runs lighter: as of 2009, over 160,000 people at Bristol Motor Speedway sang Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places" before a NASCAR race, and in September 2025 the Karaoke World Championships are set for Bangkok, Thailand.