Karaoke Trivia
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43 free Karaoke trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Karaoke is a $10 billion global business that started with eleven coin-operated boxes in a Kobe entertainment district. This karaoke trivia quiz has 43 free questions with answers about how it happened: the Japanese bandleader and the Filipino piano maker who both claim to have invented it, what the word literally means, how karaoke boxes, noraebangs and KTVs differ, why one song became dangerous to sing in the Philippines, and the world records for the biggest and longest singalongs. The second half is about the songs themselves, the ones that get grabbed off the songbook every night: who wrote them, what they were about, and the chart facts behind them, from a Neil Diamond song that Fenway Park plays every eighth inning to a Killers single that has spent nearly ten years on the UK chart. It is built for a karaoke night, a music quiz round or anyone who has ever queued for a mic. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on karaoke and on the individual songs, and each question links to the page that establishes it.
30 of 43 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word karaoke is a clipped compound of two Japanese words meaning what?
Empty orchestra
Empty orchestra: Daisuke Inoue said even the word wasn't his invention, since it was already show-business slang before his machines.
Q 02Daisuke Inoue later invented a way to kill which pests that crawl into karaoke machines and eat the wires?
Cockroaches
Cockroaches: Inoue never patented karaoke, so he missed out on its fortune, but he has made money selling pesticide to kill them.
Q 03What did Daisuke Inoue call his original coin-operated karaoke machine?
8 Juke
8 Juke: Inoue leased the first machines to bars in Kobe, where a ¥100 coin bought five minutes of singing.
Q 04How did Daisuke Inoue get customers to try his machines after Kobe's bars ignored them?
He had a woman sing on 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.
Q 05Which award did the man credited with inventing karaoke receive?
The Ig Nobel Peace Prize
The Ig Nobel Peace Prize: when he accepted it at Harvard, the audience gave him a standing ovation.
Q 06Which Filipino inventor patented a karaoke-style machine called the 'Sing-Along System'?
Roberto del Rosario
Roberto del Rosario: he first built the system as a teaching aid for the singing students at his own music school.
Q 07What were the instrumental-only B-side tracks used in the Philippines popularly called?
Minus-One
By the 1980s including a Minus-One track on the B-side of Philippine singles was standard practice.
Q 08What do Filipinos call coin-operated karaoke machines that show running lyrics on a screen?
Videoke
Videoke: a five-peso coin buys a song, and the machines became so popular that nighttime videoke bars sprang up.
Q 09What are private karaoke rooms called in South Korea?
Noraebang
Noraebang: a visit is almost a compulsory last round after drinking, because Koreans see singing together as a way to strengthen relationships.
Q 10What is the Japanese term for singing karaoke alone?
Hitokara
Hitokara: solo singing has become common enough that karaoke chains have added more one-person rooms.
Q 11Japanese karaoke singers call their showpiece song juhachiban, a nod to what?
The 18 best kabuki plays
The 18 best kabuki plays: actor Ichikawa Danjuro VII named his family's 18 signature plays, so 'number eighteen' came to mean a specialty.
Q 12What is the CD+G format's "G" for?
Graphics, the lyrics encoded on a subcode track
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.
Q 13What technique do cheap home systems use to strip vocals from ordinary CDs?
Q 21Finnish producers organize which international amateur singing competition, running since 2003?
The Karaoke World Championships
Its 2011 edition inspired ABC's Karaoke Battle USA to pick American entrants; the 2025 finals were set for Bangkok.
Q 22Which late-night host's Carpool Karaoke featured Mariah Carey and Paul McCartney?
James Corden
James Corden: he says the idea came from a 2011 Comic Relief sketch in which he sang along with George Michael in a car.
Q 23In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray's character is in Tokyo to shoot ads for which product?
Suntory whiskey
Subtracting one channel from the other
Subtracting one channel from the other: it cancels anything mixed dead center, so centered instruments like the bass can vanish along with the voice.
Q 14What was Japan's networked system that sent MIDI songs by phone line to singing machines called?
Tsushin karaoke
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.
Q 15Which company introduced LaserDisc karaoke machines that showed lyrics over music videos?
Pioneer
Pioneer: its disc changers eventually ran out of room for new songs, and phone-line karaoke networks replaced them in the 1990s.
Q 16Which PS2 game by Harmonix and Konami scored players on pitch, timing and rhythm?
Karaoke Revolution
Karaoke Revolution: Harmonix later carried the game's singing features over into Rock Band.
Q 17Which song became so linked to fatal karaoke disputes in the Philippines that some bars removed it?
My Way
Newspapers called them the "My Way killings"; some singers simply refused to perform it among strangers.
Q 18Where did a 2009 crowd set the Guinness record for the largest karaoke by singing 'Friends in Low Places'?
Bristol Motor Speedway
Bristol Motor Speedway: 160,000 NASCAR fans sang the Garth Brooks hit together before the Sharpie 500 race began.
Q 19Which singer turned a Robert Hazard song written from a guy's view into a feminist anthem?
Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper: with Hazard's blessing she changed some of the lyrics, and 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' took on a new meaning.
Q 20Many of Japan's early roadside karaoke boxes of the 1980s were built from what?
Shipping containers
Shipping containers: the roadside boxes opened karaoke to people who wanted to sing away from bars, creating a whole new market.
Suntory whiskey: his character is a fading movie star taking the lucrative ads, and he ends up singing karaoke with Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte.
Q 24Which French song, first recorded by Claude François, did Paul Anka rework for Frank Sinatra?
Comme d'habitude
Comme d'habitude: its French lyrics describe a couple drifting apart, while Anka's English words look back on a whole life.
Q 25Which comedy's headbanging car scene sent Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' back up the US charts?
Wayne's World
Wayne's World: Mike Myers insisted on using the song for the scene when others making the film had doubts about it.
Q 26Which ballpark turned Neil Diamond's 'Sweet Caroline' into a nightly eighth-inning sing-along?
Fenway Park
Fenway Park: days after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Neil Diamond came to the ballpark and led the crowd in singing it.
Q 27Besides Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora, who co-wrote "Livin' on a Prayer"?
Desmond Child
It was the band's second consecutive Billboard Hot 100 number one and spent four weeks on top in early 1987.
Q 28Which group wrote the Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton duet that topped the Hot 100?
The Bee Gees
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.
Q 29David Bowie wrote which song as a parody of an English adaptation he had lost the chance to write?
Life on Mars?
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.
Q 30Who wrote and produced Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart"?
Jim Steinman
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.