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.