43 Fun Facts About Karaoke

The word karaoke is a clipped compound of two Japanese words meaning what?

Empty orchestra: Daisuke Inoue said even the word wasn't his invention, since it was already show-business slang before his machines.

Daisuke Inoue later invented a way to kill which pests that crawl into karaoke machines and eat the wires?

Cockroaches: Inoue never patented karaoke, so he missed out on its fortune, but he has made money selling pesticide to kill them.

What did Daisuke Inoue call his original coin-operated karaoke machine?

8 Juke: Inoue leased the first machines to bars in Kobe, where a ¥100 coin bought five minutes of singing.

How did Daisuke Inoue get customers to try his machines after Kobe's bars ignored them?

He had a woman sing on them: Inoue says he sent a female employee around the clubs as a decoy, and the stunt soon got customers interested.

Which award did the man credited with inventing karaoke receive?

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize: when he accepted it at Harvard, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

Which Filipino inventor patented a karaoke-style machine called the 'Sing-Along System'?

Roberto del Rosario: he first built the system as a teaching aid for the singing students at his own music school.

What were the instrumental-only B-side tracks used in the Philippines popularly called?

By the 1980s including a Minus-One track on the B-side of Philippine singles was standard practice.

What do Filipinos call coin-operated karaoke machines that show running lyrics on a screen?

Videoke: a five-peso coin buys a song, and the machines became so popular that nighttime videoke bars sprang up.

What are private karaoke rooms called in South Korea?

Noraebang: a visit is almost a compulsory last round after drinking, because Koreans see singing together as a way to strengthen relationships.

What is the Japanese term for singing karaoke alone?

Hitokara: solo singing has become common enough that karaoke chains have added more one-person rooms.

Japanese karaoke singers call their showpiece song juhachiban, a nod to what?

The 18 best kabuki plays: actor Ichikawa Danjuro VII named his family's 18 signature plays, so 'number eighteen' came to mean a specialty.

What is the CD+G format's "G" for?

Graphics, the lyrics encoded on a subcode track: they sit in spare channels a normal audio CD leaves unused, which is why plain CD players can't show the words.

What technique do cheap home systems use to strip vocals from ordinary CDs?

Subtracting one channel from the other: it cancels anything mixed dead center, so centered instruments like the bass can vanish along with the voice.

What was Japan's networked system that sent MIDI songs by phone line to singing machines called?

Tsushin karaoke: new songs arrived over the line instead of on discs, so bars got fresh hits fast, and it swept Japan in the 1990s.

Which company introduced LaserDisc karaoke machines that showed lyrics over music videos?

Pioneer: its disc changers eventually ran out of room for new songs, and phone-line karaoke networks replaced them in the 1990s.

Which PS2 game by Harmonix and Konami scored players on pitch, timing and rhythm?

Karaoke Revolution: Harmonix later carried the game's singing features over into Rock Band.

Which song became so linked to fatal karaoke disputes in the Philippines that some bars removed it?

Newspapers called them the "My Way killings"; some singers simply refused to perform it among strangers.

Where did a 2009 crowd set the Guinness record for the largest karaoke by singing 'Friends in Low Places'?

Bristol Motor Speedway: 160,000 NASCAR fans sang the Garth Brooks hit together before the Sharpie 500 race began.

Which singer turned a Robert Hazard song written from a guy's view into a feminist anthem?

Cyndi Lauper: with Hazard's blessing she changed some of the lyrics, and 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' took on a new meaning.

Many of Japan's early roadside karaoke boxes of the 1980s were built from what?

Shipping containers: the roadside boxes opened karaoke to people who wanted to sing away from bars, creating a whole new market.

Finnish producers organize which international amateur singing competition, running since 2003?

Its 2011 edition inspired ABC's Karaoke Battle USA to pick American entrants; the 2025 finals were set for Bangkok.

Which late-night host's Carpool Karaoke featured Mariah Carey and Paul McCartney?

James Corden: he says the idea came from a 2011 Comic Relief sketch in which he sang along with George Michael in a car.

In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray's character is in Tokyo to shoot ads for which product?

Suntory whiskey: his character is a fading movie star taking the lucrative ads, and he ends up singing karaoke with Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte.

Which French song, first recorded by Claude François, did Paul Anka rework for Frank Sinatra?

Comme d'habitude: its French lyrics describe a couple drifting apart, while Anka's English words look back on a whole life.

Which comedy's headbanging car scene sent Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' back up the US charts?

Wayne's World: Mike Myers insisted on using the song for the scene when others making the film had doubts about it.

Which ballpark turned Neil Diamond's 'Sweet Caroline' into a nightly eighth-inning sing-along?

Fenway Park: days after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Neil Diamond came to the ballpark and led the crowd in singing it.

Besides Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, who co-wrote "Livin' on a Prayer"?

It was the band's second consecutive Billboard Hot 100 number one and spent four weeks on top in early 1987.

Which group wrote the Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton duet that topped the Hot 100?

The Bee Gees: Barry Gibb says they wrote it as an R&B song for Diana Ross, then offered it when Kenny Rogers wanted a duet with Dolly.

David Bowie wrote which song as a parody of an English adaptation he had lost the chance to write?

Life on Mars?: after his lyrics for a French hit were shelved, Paul Anka's version became a Frank Sinatra smash, and Bowie answered it with this 1971 song.

Who wrote and produced Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart"?

Jim Steinman: while it topped the US chart, it kept another song he wrote, Air Supply's 'Making Love Out of Nothing at All', stuck in second place.

Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" won a Grammy in which category, the only time it was ever awarded?

Gaynor recorded the vocal in a back brace after a fall at a concert; the song entered the National Recording Registry in 2016.

Which Killers single became the first song to spend five years in the UK singles chart's Top 100?

Mr. Brightside: it has no second verse, because Brandon Flowers says he 'just didn't have any other lines' when he wrote it.

Which band covered Toto's 'Africa' after a teenage fan's Twitter campaign?

Weezer: it first trolled the fan by covering Toto's 'Rosanna' instead, and Toto later returned the favor by covering Weezer's 'Hash Pipe'.

Billy Joel based 'Piano Man' on six months playing a lounge in which city under the name Bill Martin?

Los Angeles: the song's bar regulars were drawn from real customers and staff at the Executive Room, where he played in 1972.

Which Oasis song became the first track from the 1990s to reach a billion Spotify streams, in 2020?

Liam Gallagher performed it with Beady Eye at the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony.

Which company's streaming music service turned the late-night segment Carpool Karaoke into its own series?

Apple: the series launched as an Apple Music exclusive, and Apple later moved it to its Apple TV+ streaming service.

Which magazine named karaoke inventor Daisuke Inoue among the most influential Asians of the century?

Time: its writer said that as much as Mao Zedong or Mohandas Gandhi changed Asian days, Inoue transformed its nights.

What is the bar game of punching in a random song number and singing whatever comes up called?

Some machines pre-program the game and limit it to a genre, so nobody gets stuck with an obscure national anthem.

What is "movieoke" or karamovie?

Acting out movie scenes in place of the stars: film fan Anastasia Fite launched it at a New York bar, muting the DVD so volunteers could voice the characters.

Who hosted the early-1960s NBC series that ran song lyrics along the bottom of the screen for viewers to sing along?

Mitch Miller: as Columbia's pop chief, he passed on a young Elvis Presley, balking at the price Colonel Parker demanded.

Shigeichi Negishi's 1967 coin-operated machine, the first sold commercially, carried what brand name?

The Japanese engineer ran into distribution troubles and stopped making it soon after.

Bandai's karaoke game Karaoke Studio, sold with its own microphone, was released for which console?

The Family Computer: its sound chip could only manage bleepy versions of the pop hits, and Bandai sold extra song cartridges that plugged into the unit.

Which basic skill did Daisuke Inoue lack while playing in Kobe's club bands?

Reading music: he had to learn each new song by heart, and he says that struggle was part of why he built his machine.