> Often it is the original soundtrack with the vocals suppressed (sometimes well via remastering and sometimes poorly with an equalizer).

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...

That feels like an accidental, not essential, property of karaoke. I doubt anyone who enjoys karaoke would reject a track recorded by the original artist because it wasn't a cover by someone they'd never heard of.

> That feels like an accidental, not essential, property of karaoke.

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.

The fact that most karaoke audio tracks are performed as covers for financial reasons does not change how the word karaoke is used in actual language.

There are tons of cases where you'll hear covers instead of a licensed original, because paying Harry Fox (ie, just the songwriter) is cheaper.

That's not an essential component of Karaoke though. I live in Japan where Karaoke is extremely popular, and in the more higher-end karaoke systems, you can pick the original music for popular songs (or sometimes you can even pick live performances with the video of the artist on stage and everything)

Fair enough, but the use of original source material is still the exception by a wide margin.

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

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.