Where did karaoke come from?
It started with a guy in Japan in the early ’70s named Daisuke Inoue, who was a musician and not a very good one. But he was very good at what I would call being a middleman. He noticed that in bars there would be a musician playing and people singing along. If you were to streamline this process — add more songs by having a machine, charging a flat rate — there was money to be made. He invented something called the Juke-8. It looks like a little speaker box with an eight-track machine. He would hire musicians and get people to write out these lyric books, and he leased these out. He hired these hostesses to walk into the bar and kind of discover the machine. Then they would hand the microphone over to these drunken Japanese businessmen. It spread through parts of Asia in the ’70s and came to America in the early ’80s. Bar owners in New York and Orlando were hustling people to sing, but it didn’t catch on at first, for a lot of cultural reasons. I was trying to remember when I first
