What can karaoke teach us about AI?
Karaoke's disruption of the music world presaged AI's disruption of creative fields today.
Shigeichi Negishi, who created the world’s very first karaoke machine, passed away on January 26th. I spent quite a bit of time with him in 2018, when I was working on the karaoke chapter of Pure Invention. He was 95 then, but felt easily two decades younger, slightly hunched, perhaps, more than a little hard of hearing, but sharp as a tack and quick with a joke. He had an infectious laugh, which I remember from when we tried, unsuccessfully, to sing a duet on the machine: we couldn’t find the pamphlets of lyrics. When his daughter reached out to tell me that he had died at the age of 100, the news still came as a shock.
Earlier this month, I wrote Negishi’s obituary, which ran in The Wall Street Journal. It went viral, getting picked up by outlets such as CBS, CNN, and the Japan Times. I found myself mentioned alongside Negishi in the pages of Pitchfork, Stereogum, and even Rolling Stone. Somehow I ended up getting interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Getting to meet Negishi was more than just a highlight of working on my book. It was a personal highlight, one of those things that made me grateful I’d had the ability and means to study Japanese and make a life here. Over the course of my career I’ve spoken to celebrities and scientists, craftsmen and women, even a few Zero pilots. But Negishi stood out.
I knew him as the inventor of the karaoke machine -- a truly revolutionary and world-changing bit of technology. But what greeted me at the door of his suburban Tokyo home was a genial grandfather. Great-grandfather, actually. He was as humble as they come, utterly unconvinced of the epic nature of what he’d done. The quietness, the enviable normalcy, of his life belied the profound impact of his invention on culture around the globe.
This isn’t idle hyperbole, though I’d forgive anyone for thinking so. The karaoke machine seems, at first glance, like a trivial escape. Perhaps the most trivial there is. How could singing Don’t Stop Believin’, badly, change the world? One might feel that way because abroad, karaoke pretty much began and ended as a barroom pastime. In its homeland of Japan, karaoke’s evolution played out very differently.
Negishi made his machine in 1967. After that, rivals entered the fray one after the other. Karaoke continued to evolve for two decades before anyone even thought of exporting it beyond Japan’s borders. By the Eighties, karaoke had emerged as a driving force in the development of cutting-edge consumer electronics. Japanese companies battled for dominance in the sing-along sphere, sparking an “arms race” for data storage, transmission, and display technologies that paved the way for the modern media ecosystems we take for granted today.
The world’s first popular music-streaming service wasn’t Spotify (2006) or SoundCloud (2007); it was “communication karaoke,” which started streaming in Japan over a decade earlier in 1993. Did you know that Sony only greenlit the PlayStation because it could double as a karaoke machine? True story. Nobody involved in the invention of karaoke could have anticipated these “use cases,” decades down the line. You can read much more about this in Pure Invention, but the bottom line is that the seemingly simple act of automating the sing-along opened a technological Pandora’s box.
The anxiety over AI’s impact on artists and society at large feels like the sort of thing that could only be happening now, in our hyperconnected era. But in fact, that debate actually began in Japan, with Negishi’s creation of the first karaoke machine in 1967. Consider this:
AI companies continue to battle allegations that their models are based upon stolen art. Karaoke was built off of purloined creative products, too. In Japan of the Sixties and Seventies, there was no precedent for licensing music being performed by amateurs. It wouldn’t be until the early 1980s that Japanese courts handed down rulings that definitively established that karaoke providers needed to pay royalties to record companies.
A similar uproar is unfolding over fears of AI replacing human artists. Karaoke absolutely infuriated performing artists when it first appeared. In the Sixties, Japanese cities were filled with nagashi and hiki-katari, wandering musicians who plied watering holes in search of patrons who wanted to sing. They feared that karaoke would automate them out of a job, and they were right. Thousands of these performers worked Japan’s cities in the Sixties. You’d be hard-pressed to find one today.
Karaoke democratized creativity — and by extension celebrity. As one of the first devices in any sphere of life to make rank amateurs feel like pros, it represented the first glimmers of personal branding. The rise of the individual-as-entertainer caused all sorts of problems in its own right. Quiet neighborhoods found themselves flooded with noise from amateur singing contests held in local bars. Melees erupted over patrons who hogged the mic. And critics raged that karaoke resulted in the dumbing-down of musical culture as a whole, because everyone tended to gravitate towards the same handful of songs.
So while karaoke and AI represent entirely different kinds of technologies, in broad strokes, there are fascinating, and revealing, parallels between the two. The karaoke machine automated a creative process, using music created by other people. It caused a lot of fury and debate that was only resolved much later, as the technology emerged from the fringes and mainstreamed into the fabric of daily life. With AI, we are still at the “fury and debate” point. History doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.
It’s easy to understand our collective unease over creative machines – or more accurately, machines that offer a simulation of creativity. As anyone who has spent much time looking at AI output knows, the quality is often insipid at best. AI might well evolve into something better, but for now it remains a decidedly mediocre writer, artist, and maker of videos. But then again, doesn’t mediocre describe the average karaoke singer, too? So maybe we’ve actually been living in a post-AI world for a lot longer than we think. We aren’t exploring uncharted territory so much as navigating new parts of a landscape first revealed by the karaoke machine.
And how did things play out with the karaoke machine in Japan? New regulations, coupled with technological advances that let rights-holders track songs in real time, led to karaoke’s enthusiastic adoption by record labels and Japanese society at large in the 1990s. That in turn fueled the creation of new styles of music that hadn’t existed before karaoke. As record producers realized how much money they could make from karaoke royalties, they replaced divas and pros with singers with vocal ranges average folk felt more comfortable choosing to sing themselves — a sort of interactive reality TV for pop music. Whether that musical shift was good or bad is subjective. But the rise of girl- and boy-next-door idols proved explosively and enduringly popular among young Japanese: an unintended side-effect of karaoke’s huge popularity at the time. “The street finds its own uses for things,” as William Gibson put it in Burning Chrome.
This is what makes karaoke and AI so interesting, even though they are products of different socio-economic periods, different markets, almost different worlds. Shigeichi Negishi’s life reads like a microcosm of 20th century Japanese history. He was born just a few months after the Great Kanto Earthquake reduced the city of Tokyo to rubble. He had the misfortune of being conscripted into World War II, and the luck to survive. He went on to play small but key roles in Japan’s rise as a consumer-electronics empire, then a pop-cultural one. And he spent his retirement in a nation rapidly becoming known as one of the planet’s most hyper-aged. But Negishi wasn’t simply a mirror of his own times: the questions he unwittingly raised by automating the sing-along remain just as relevant today as when he invented the karaoke machine back in 1967.
In other words, the idea of AI spreading through society like some kind of Tainted Love is scary, but Don’t Fear the Reaper. It’s too early to tell if Everything's Gonna Be Alright or if in the end Mr. Roboto will automate us out of our livelihoods, but we aren’t Dancing in the Dark. Karaoke’s history offers lessons that might just have all of us saying I Can See Clearly Now.
Fascinating perspective. Thanks for sharing the back story! Now I want to belt out my 18番 at an old karaoke container!
Another great photo! This must have been an incredible afternoon 💪