The inventor of the first karaoke machine dies at the age of 100

Shigeichi Negishi, the entrepreneur who invented the world’s first karaoke machine, has died at the age of 100.

Negishi, whose 1967 prototype Sparko Box is among several devices credited with starting the karaoke craze in Japan, died of natural causes in January. His death, which was reported last week, was confirmed to CNN by Shiro Kataoka, managing director of the All Japan Karaoke Industry Association.

Born in 1923, Negishi founded and ran a company that assembled car stereo systems for automakers in northern Tokyo, CNN reported. As a regular listener to the one-voice radio show broadcast in Japan at the time, he connected a spare tape deck to the microphone and mixing circuitry so he could hear himself singing over the music.

“When I asked the factory engineer, he said, ‘It’s easy,'” Negishi recalled in a report published by the All Japan Karaoke Manufacturers Association, the industry body for karaoke operators in Japan. “So I connected the microphone input to the car stereo and created something kind of like a prototype jukebox.”

According to author Matt Alt, whose interview with Negishi appears in his 2020 book Pure Invention: How Japan Created the Modern World, the inventor first tested the device using an instrumental recording of Yoshio Kodama’s 1930s song “Mujo no Yume.”

“It works!” – he told Alt, recalling the moment when he heard his voice coming from the speakers along with the music. “That’s all I thought about. Most of all it was fun. I immediately realized that I had discovered something new.”

Marketing the device as the Sparko Box, he sold them along with lyric cards and reportedly produced and installed about 8,000 throughout Japan, mostly in bars and restaurants. By the time Negishi stopped selling his products in the 1970s, several competing machines had been invented and brought to market.

“At that time, it was not common to sing in stores, so it was perhaps inevitable that (Sparko boxes) were sold as background music,” Negishi said in a post on the All Japan Karaoke Manufacturers Association website. “Now that I think about it, I’m a little embarrassed.”

The industry body does not credit the invention of karaoke to one person (which literally translates to “empty orchestra”), but instead credits several individuals who independently created karaoke machines in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Perhaps the most famous of these is musician and businessman Daisuke Inoue, whose 8 Juke jukebox, invented in 1971 and also based on a car stereo, is credited with helping to commercialize karaoke.

But Inoue, like Negishi, did not patent his invention, and electronics manufacturers soon began making and selling their own versions. By the 1980s, “karaoke boxes” (known elsewhere as KTV) had swept Japan, and private rooms had supplanted bars and restaurants as the main venues for Japanese amateur singers.

Subsequent developments, including the introduction of video karaoke and online karaoke systems, helped the phenomenon spread throughout Asia and the world in the following decades.

Today, there are more than 8,000 dedicated karaoke parlors in Japan, while 131,500 bars have karaoke machines – a market worth 387.9 billion yen ($2.6 billion) in 2022, according to estimates from the All Japan Karaoke Industry Association.