In 1971, a struggling nightclub drummer named Daisuke Inoue built the first karaoke machine in his home city of Kobe using a tape recorder, a coin box, and an amplifier — and by not bothering to patent his invention because he thought he had merely combined other people's parts, he lost roughly 100 million dollars a year in royalties

In 1971, a struggling nightclub drummer named Daisuke Inoue built the first karaoke machine in his home city of Kobe using a tape recorder, a coin box, and an amplifier — and by not bothering to patent his invention because he thought he had merely combined other people's parts, he lost roughly 100 million dollars a year in royalties

The single most-commercially-consequential invention of the late-20th-century Japanese consumer electronics sector was popularised by a self-described mediocre bar drummer who did not consider it an invention — and who, as it happened, was not technically its first inventor. The specific historical record established by the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association across the 1990s and confirmed by the IEEE Milestones Committee in 2024, is tha…