How Karaoke Conquered the World

In 1971, a drummer in Kobe, Japan, built eleven machines out of parts he already had, and rented them to bars. Each machine was an amplifier, a microphone, a coin box, and an eight-track car stereo, bolted together. A customer put in 100 yen, and the machine played five minutes of backing music while the customer sang along, reading the words from a piece of paper. The drummer's name was Daisuke Inoue, and he had just invented karaoke. He never patented it. He never got rich from it. And within a few decades, his invention was in almost every major city on earth.

A drummer and a tape

Inoue was born in Osaka in 1940, and moved to Kobe after the war. As a young man he played drums in a band that accompanied businessmen who wanted to sing in bars. The band was the backing, and the customer was the star. One night, the band could not perform, so Inoue gave the client a tape of the backing music instead, and the client sang along to it. That was the moment the idea took shape. He sang his first karaoke song in 1969, and by 1971 he had decided the idea might have wider appeal.

He had eleven machines built with the help of friends. Putting them together took about two months and cost around 425 dollars per unit. He took ten of them to acquaintances' clubs and asked them to place the machines on the bar. All ten agreed. The price was 100 yen for five minutes, about the cost of three or four drinks in 1971. People paid it, and they sang. Inoue later said he never thought it would make it out of the city. He was wrong, and that is the part I keep coming back to. The machine was not clever. It was an amplifier, a microphone, a coin box, and a car stereo. There was no new technology in it at all. What was new was the idea: that ordinary people would pay to be the singer, even badly, even in front of strangers, if you gave them the music and took the band away.

Empty orchestra

The word karaoke comes from two Japanese words: kara, meaning empty, and oke, short for okesutora, meaning orchestra. An empty orchestra. The band is gone, and only the singer is left. It is a perfect name, and it is also a little sad, because the orchestra was the whole point of a band, and karaoke throws it away and keeps only the part where someone gets to be heard.

Inoue was not the only person to have the idea. In 1967, four years before the Juke 8, a man named Shigeichi Negishi built an early karaoke-style machine in Japan called the Sparko Box. He owned a company that made eight-track decks, and he had been singing along to a radio show called Pop Songs Without Lyrics at the end of the work day. He never patented his machine either. History credits Inoue as the inventor of karaoke, but the honest version is that the idea had more than one father, and neither of them thought it was worth a patent. Inoue put it plainly years later: "I'm not an inventor. I simply put things that already exist together, which is completely different. I took a car stereo, a coin box and a small amp to make the karaoke. Who would even consider patenting something like that?" He told another interviewer that he could have patented it, but at the time he had no idea. A friend of his has said that some people estimate he lost 150 million dollars by not patenting it. Inoue did patent one thing for karaoke machines, eventually. It was a pesticide.

The patent went to someone else

The patent for a karaoke machine did get filed, just not by Inoue. In 1975, a Filipino inventor named Roberto del Rosario developed a sing-along system he called Minus-One, and he secured patents for it in the Philippines in 1983 and 1986. He was the man who got the legal claim to the invention, and he had twenty patents to his name. But the strange part is that neither Inoue nor del Rosario significantly benefited from the worldwide surge of karaoke that started in the 1980s. The profits went to the larger Japanese corporations that came later and built better machines. The two men credited with the invention watched the industry they started make its money for other people. I think there is something quietly honest about that. The person who has the idea is rarely the person who gets paid for it, and the person who gets paid is rarely the person who had the idea. Inoue understood this, and he did not seem bitter about it. He kept working in the industry, running a business in the 1980s that licensed music for eight-track karaoke machines, and he only copyrighted the name karaoke in the United States in 2009, almost forty years after he built the first machine.

The key dates

From Kobe to every city on earth

By the 1980s, the idea of the coin-operated sing-along machine had been picked up by larger Japanese corporations, which started manufacturing commercial versions of their own with better technologies like LaserDisc. Karaoke soon spread to the rest of Asia and then to other countries all over the world. During the 1980s and 1990s, karaoke bars expanded rapidly throughout Asia, in South Korea, China, the Philippines, and Thailand. A new kind of venue appeared: the karaoke box, a small or medium-sized private room rented by the hour, where a group of friends could sing together instead of performing in front of strangers. In South Korea the rooms are called noraebangs. In mainland China and Taiwan they are called KTV. The private room turned out to be the form that fit Asia best, and it is still the dominant form there today.

Karaoke reached the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when bars and clubs in the United States, Canada, and Europe started hosting karaoke nights to draw customers. Today there are karaoke bars in almost every major city in the world, and the global karaoke market has been estimated to be worth nearly 10 billion dollars. The machine that started as eleven boxes in Kobe bars is now a feature of parties, weddings, and office nights out in every country, and it is a form of entertainment that lets anyone be a singer for a night, even badly, even joyfully.

Inoue got his recognition in the end, just not in money. In 1999, TIME named him one of the most influential Asian people of the century. In 2004, he went to Harvard University to accept the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, a jokey award presented by real Nobel laureates, for providing what the ceremony called an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other. He received a standing ovation, called himself the last samurai, and sang a wobbly version of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." A Japanese biopic about him, called Karaoke, came out the next year. I like that ending, because it fits the invention. Karaoke was never about being good at singing. It was about being willing to sing anyway, and about everyone else being willing to listen. A machine made of a car stereo and a coin box taught the world to tolerate each other's terrible singing, and to enjoy it. That is not a small thing. It might be the most generous invention of the twentieth century, and the man who made it gave it away for free.