Shigeichi Negishi, the entrepreneur who invented the world’s first karaoke machine, has died aged 100.
Negishi, whose 1967 “Sparko Box” prototype is among several devices credited with ushering in Japan’s karaoke craze, died from natural causes in January. His death was made public last week by Shiro Kataoka, managing director of the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association.
Born in 1923, Negishi founded and ran a company that assembled car stereos for automobile manufacturers in northern Tokyo. A regular listener to a singalong radio show broadcast in Japan at the time, he hooked a spare tape deck up to a microphone and mixing circuit so he could hear himself singing over music.
“It works!” he said, recalling the moment he heard his voice coming through the speakers alongside the music. “That’s all I was thinking. Most of all, it was fun. I knew right away I’d discovered something new.”
Marketing the device as a Sparko Box, he sold them alongside lyrics cards and reportedly produced and installed around 8,000 around Japan, mainly at bars and restaurants. By the time Negishi stopped selling the products in the 1970s, several rival machines had been invented and taken to market.
Today, Japan is home to more than 8,000 dedicated karaoke box venues, while 131,500 bars are equipped with karaoke machines — a market worth a combined 387.9 billion yen ($2.6 billion) in 2022, according to estimates from the All-Japan Karaoke Industrialist Association.
There are hundreds of venues in Edmonton that offer Karaoke and the top ten can be found on yelp.com
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