The Father Of Karaoke

He once claimed that he went to school in order to sleep, and that laziness was the major factor in thinking up karaoke. Daisuke Inoue never learned to read music, so he taught himself new music just by listening and repetition. He also claimed, in an interview with Time magazine, that while at school in Osaka, Japan, he chose to take up the drums because "all you have to do is hit them."

By the early 1970s, he was part of a band which played in bars and clubs in nearby Kobe. The Japanese custom of providing musical entertainment for evening outings meant that it came quite naturally for the audience to sing along with the band. Mr. Inoue hit on the idea of pre-recording his own backing tracks and encouraging customers to sing, however unmusical or inhibited they might be, by following instead of leading, and he used technical tricks to drown or attenuate the more jarring singing styles that emerged.

It started in earnest in 1971, when the President of a steel company invited him to join a week-end company trip to a resort to provide the entertainment. Unable to accept, Mr. Inoue created a substitute for the real thing by using music recorded on tape. It worked like a charm. Although this could have made him a millionaire had he only thought of patenting it, he has no regrets. As he told an interviewer from The Independent , "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?"

Others have and did, of course developing more sophisticated models. But initially, Mr. Inoue rented out his karaoke machines with tape-recorded music at relatively little profit - 100 yen per song - the price of a few drinks in 1971. Competitors sprang up...