History

The concept of creating studio recordings that lack the lead vocal has been around for probably nearly as long as recording itself. Many artists, amateur and professional, perform in situations where a full band/orchestra is either logistically or financially impractical and so they use a "karaoke" recording, but they are actually the original artists. (This is not to be confused with "lip syncing" in which a performer mimes to a previously produced studio recording with the lead vocal intact.)

AudioSynTrac and Numark Electronics were the first companies that combined to offer sing-along tapes and audio equipment to the rest of the world. The president of AudioSynTrac, Scott Ebright was a California music promoter and talent agent who booked singers at resorts and hotels across the United States. The first karaoke machine was invented by Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue in Kobe, Japan, in the early 1970s. After becoming popular in Japan, karaoke spread to East and Southeast Asia during the 1980s and subsequently to other parts of the world.

In Japan, it has long been common to provide musical entertainment at a dinner or a party. Japanese drummer Daisuke Inoue was asked by frequent guests in the Utagoe Kissa, where he performed, to provide a recording of his performance so that they could sing along on a company-sponsored vacation. Realizing the potential for the market, Inoue made a tape recorder that played a song for a 100-yen coin.

Development in Japan

Instead of giving his karaoke machines away, Inoue leased them out so that stores did not have to buy new songs on their own. Originally, it was considered a somewhat expensive fad, as it lacked the live atmosphere of a real performance and 500 yen in the 1970s was the price of two typical lunches, but it caught on as a popular entertainment. Karaoke machines were initially placed in restaurants and hotel rooms; soon, new businesses called karaoke boxes, with compartmented rooms, became popular. In 2004, Daisuke Inoue was awarded the tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel Peace Prize for inventing karaoke, "thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."

1980s: Filipino patent

Inoue never bothered to patent his invention, losing his chance to become one of Japan's richest men. Roberto del Rosario, a Filipino inventor who called his sing-along system "Minus-One", now holds the patent for the device now commonly known as the "karaoke machine". As a matter of fact, "Minus-One" has been in existence in the Philippines since the 70s.Fact: date=August 2008 The spread of "Minus-One" music would have been attributed to a few Filipinos who brought with them their music wherever they go and a few went to Japan as entertainers during the early part of this decade and that may have had that indirect influence on Inoue's ingenuity. Following a court battle with a Japanese company which claimed to have invented the system, del Rosario's patents were issued in 1983 and 1986, more than a decade after Inoue's original unpatented invention of the device in 1971.