1) Perhaps they don’t want to trigger a different licensing model (on either the music or the lyrics) that applies specifically to karaoke devices and venues. Just a guess, not a music lawyer, but all sorts of unexpected terms apply to music licensing (such as streaming TV services not being able to use music from the original TV broadcast) 2) Perhaps they don’t want to associate with the karaoke “brand” which some users might perceive as kitschy or low-quality (have you ever seen a karaoke video?)

Another thing is that when you sing a foreign song, the karaoke also means to read the foreign subtitles in your own language. It's an extra meaning they might want to avoid, I assume this is not a feature they have.

It also might imply perfect vocal removal, which they aren’t guaranteeing.

That's why karaoke is so popular in Japan.

It also says that Karaoke in Japan is predated by sing-a-long programs in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaoke?wprov=sfti1

Besides that I assume any patent from the 70s is now expired.

"The world's first karaoke machine, the Juke-8, was built by Japanese inventor and musician Daisuke Inoue in 1971. But it is Filipino inventor Roberto del Rosario who holds the machine's patent. He developed the Karaoke Sing-Along System in 1975."

"Hey we just added a cultural pastime as a feature!"

There are some that could twist this feature into "Apple profiting off of cultural appropriation".

And "real-time lyrics" is _already_ in Apple Music.

In your/Apple's defense, the photo they included is pretty clear what's going on. Important to note the footnote on the page -- this isn't even full-fledged karaoke: "The vocal slider adjusts vocal volume, but does not fully remove vocals."

I'm being nitpicky for sure, but that's kind of what HN and similar forums are for. Especially when it's Apple, which I hold to a pretty high standard for product marketing.

     And "real-time lyrics" is _already_ in Apple Music.

This new feature appears to sync the lyrics to the current word of lyrics, which is what karaoke usually does. Not sure how big a deal that is to folks looking to do their own vocals.

I'm curious about how they're doing that word-for-word timing. Hardcoded metadata? ML? Is it a simple interpolation based on the existing line-by-line timing?

I'd guess it's done using the same speech-to-text system used by voice assistants, which can certainly show the words it hears in near-realtime -- and way more quickly when it already knows what words it's listening for.

By the way, karaoke often highlights individual syllables, not just whole words.

edit: ultimately I could care less (but not by much) about using it; I am just curious about what they offer and how they compete.

I know the last thing I want is for some random person to sing the song we're all listening to given that most people can't sing.

I find myself usually telling the kids in the car to pipe down and let the artist sing.

So I'm really interested in understanding the demo for this feature.

It seems that your kids are the intended target.

Kids love to sing along with music. You've already discovered that.

You must not have 10 to 12-year-old girls. Put a couple of them in a room, and eventually they'll start singing.

Wondered if "karaoke" is trademarked? (or patented?!)

It doesn't seem to me likely that they didn't think their audience would know the word "karaoke" at this point, but I don't know.

And if Apple knows anything is how to market / rebrand the same old shit and sell it to the masses at really marked up prices for profit.

Polish and perfection makes this less appealing to me. Makes it feel up-tight and a bit snobby.

Also, I had a friend who got addicted to Smule which is an online sing duets with random strangers. It uses auto-tune so that anyone can enjoy themselves. I never tried it but he said it was amazing and he got a ton of joy from it.

Me, I like the idea that I can show off my amazing singing skills so if this auto-tunes everyone then that will go away. On the other hand, it's always been frustrating that box style karaoke places rarely have a large selection of western music (most of them are targeting the subset of their local market that would actually to got a box style karaoke place). My hope is that with this more of them will support just using the room as a place to use this service and then my friends and I can sing from a larger variety of songs.

I don't know if this helps at all, but you probably want to learn to sing in a different octave, not a different key. This means shifting your voice up and down from the original in multiples of eight notes. You can sing in a different octave without changing the background music and it'll sound completely normal, and have the same feel as the original song.

https://www.apple.com/jp/newsroom/2022/12/apple-introduces-a...

They're also pretty good at taking a product that is about 75% of the way to being great, and pushing it that last bit. Hell, that's arguably why they are so successful. They're not really inventors, they are perfectors.

One notable difference is that with Apple Music Sing you're singing to the original track instead of an instrumental reproduction.

Everyone I know would call that karaoke. And I assume will when telling their friends about this new feature.

If I search for Apple Sing on google news, the first 5 articles all call it "karaoke-like" or just "a karaoke feature".

Whatever reason they have for not saying the word karaoke, I don't think it's that it's not what most people consider karaoke.

A microphone (and ideally having your own vocals mixed with the audio output) is the core feature of karaoke, not playing an instrumental version of the song.

But this has become a pretty silly "debate".

Me, I'm still curious why Apple did not use the word karaoke, and do not myself think it's becuase they don't think people will consider it karaoke, but I understand you do, cool.

I think most US courts would see "karaoke" as a generic word today, but I don't know about courts outside of the US, and Karaoke is still seen as a part of the "trade dress" of a couple specific US corporations even if they can't entirely protect that trademark, they are still allowed to fight for it. At least a couple seem to still exist primarily as trolls for lawsuits today.

According to the toy aisle of US stores, "Sing" (and "Sing Along") is the only real generic English term in use, and very few (no?) current toys use the word "Karaoke", so I'm guessing those trolls are still winning in the US, for now. (Again, I don't know about the rest of the world, and toy branding is an anecdotal source at best, but still an interesting proxy view in how much large companies assume they will be sued.)

It's what the marketing machine at Apple does.

It was explained to me that the reason YouTube didn't offer a karaoke feature -- despite having licenses to a lot of lyrics -- is that karaoke is considered a separate license.

Even if you license both the recording and the lyrics, combining them into a karaoke feature isn't on the table by default.

I personally have no idea how accurate that is, but this was the scoop I got from those in a position of authority.

If it is indeed true, then perhaps that is a factor in Apple's decision not to use that word.

For prior art, see what happened to Aereo. A little-known fact is that YouTube TV started with the exact same strategy. But Google, of course, had more money and lawyers to get over the hump.

Given the monumental size of fastidiously annotated music corpuses available, the quite diligent and far more agreed upon systematisation of various forms of scientific description of musical forms, and the arguably simpler space than some of the more recent advances like 3d object generation and the sophisticated artistic output from the latest 2d image generating models... seems rather odd music has no wildly popular machine learning model, something i could ask "give me 5 minutes of synth-wave by Mozart" or "Prodigy's Firestarter, but without the lyrics"...

... My suspicion is that the entire endeavour is tortured by licensing and at every turn must avoid ever sounding like music that could be owned by someone else, and as a consequence cannot be "popular" as it must be crippled and limited, built to at all costs avoid ever sounding like Taylor Swift, Queen, Aerosmith, et al.

edit: I missed the "adjustable vocals" in the list of features. No idea then. Footnote says "The vocal slider adjusts vocal volume, but does not fully remove vocals."

This Apple feature seems to be where the same popular recording gets used, which has vocals, and then some magic processing reduces the vocals.

There has always been software to sorta-kinda suppress vocals from existing recordings, but it usually ends up sounding like trash (artifacts of all sorts) compared to just having a karaoke band re-perform the song (although the talent and production quality can be dubious with the latter). Presumably the innovation here is not having vocal suppression sound so bad.

Aside: and then there are popular artists who release an instrumental version, or stems from which an instrumental version can be trivially created, but this is so extremely rare as to not even be on-topic for a conversation about broad availability.

No, this just isn't what the word means, either popularly or in technical usage. I can't find any dictionary that restricts karaoke to covers, and if anything the dictionary emphasizes non-covers:

> an act of singing along to a music video, especially one from which the original vocals have been electronically eliminated.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/karaoke?r=75&src=ref&ch=di...

It's true that in practice most karaoke audio tracks are covers for financial reasons, but that doesn't change what the word means. Most tables have four legs, but six-legged tables are still tables.

I agree that it's not what the word inherently means, but it's the typical situation (which is effectively like meaning) where I am (USA).

See the many examples (in the West) of tools that remove vocals from audio tracks; they are ubiquitously described as useful for creating karaoke audio tracks:

https://vocalremover.org/

https://tunebat.com/Vocal-Remover

https://www.conversion-tool.com/karaoke/

https://www.songpeel.com/song-to-karaoke

To me karaoke is just signing to music, which is exactly what this is. I found it very strange that they avoided that word.

Properly licensed karaoke tracks are covers, because licensing custom remixes of original tracks is prohibitive. There are sites where you can buy stems/backing tracks of any song you can think of, which are reproductions by talented musicians.

https://www.karaoke-version.com/custombackingtrack/wham/last...

Regardless of whether you believe it's an "essential property", that karaoke music often sounds cheesy is one of several reasons Apple wouldn't want Apple Music Sing to be associated with it.

Apple's footnote disclaimer says "does not fully remove vocals" and "kara" means "empty/void" so it kind of makes sense to avoid using such an absolute term to describe something that isn't.

that's more the definition of "cover" than "karaoke" (which is a live sing-along at a bar or at home)

The real surprise is that the artists are ok with this, they must be getting compensated.

Then it would seem even more like "Apple Karaoke."

I'm thrilled to see this announcement and will likely buy my first Apple TV because of it and switch my Pandora subscription to Apple Music.

As long as you have a 0 latency Mic setup then just that and YouTube searching Karaoke versions with AdBlocker works beautifully.

At the end of the day, I just didn’t want come right out and say “rsync, ftp, something something Dropbox”. :-)

Routing the mic through your AV setup _will_ result in a delay which’ll make for a horrible experience. So don’t bother. Get a cheap mixer and a decentish Shure mic, a single active studio monitor and you’re away.

A smart tv, a microphone and a speaker? Or get a karaoke microphone with a built in speaker.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-this

While I have zero interest in karaoke, I imagine it's devastating for a bunch of karaoke apps that are now going to see new sales evaporate. I don't think it's cool for the company to just take over a market, or a smart thing to do when their app store monopoly is a political football. I guess they're relying on antitrust enforcement being more of an idea than a practical reality these days.