Some chains allow the really nervous self-isolator to sing alone in a room in their establishment but be linked online to any other rooms in their nationwide network to form a virtual group.Īrguably the most helpful of all in terms of coaxing people back to the microphone has been Joysound’s flagship offering: A series of settings that adjust the tone and clarity of your output to compensate for singing through a mask.Īnd all of this has been pursued with double urgency. The large chains have introduced apps that turn your smartphone into a remote control to avoid touching communal buttons or screens.Īnother upgrade synchronises and scrolls the lyrics on your phone, should social distancing mean you are sitting too far from the screen to read the words properly. Some of these have been relatively straightforward. My calls to karaoke majors, asking what sort of plans they were hatching, were in all instances met with a grumpy “don’t know”.īut my faith was rewarded a few months later, with what karaoke now hopes will be its tech rescue package: Tweaks to its infrastructure aimed at making public singing COVID-safe. If anything was going to find a way for tech to reopen its doors, surely it would be a segment of the leisure industry whose entire 50-year-old business model has involved piling ever more seductive layers of digitisation (voice assistance, calorie counters, competitive note-hitting gauges) on what is essentially a campfire sing-along. It was, rather, an article of geeky faith – an innate confidence that karaoke’s survival instincts would propel it towards innovation ahead of everybody else. READ: Lights out, music stops: Still-shuttered pubs, karaoke joints call for help amid COVID-19 pandemic READ: Commentary: I miss my regular bar – but I accept I might never get to return, even after circuit breakers are lifted It was not that, within a couple of weeks, the karaoke pangs of friends and contacts were overpowering.Īnd it wasn’t that the plight of Japan’s tens of thousands of karaoke establishments particularly stood out in a crisis that forced favourite bars and restaurants to close and caused the whole Japanese economy to shrink a record 7.8 per cent in that very quarter. There was, I now realise, something visceral about those calls. Principally, I wanted to know what sort of tech they planned to throw at a problem that, on an early reading, seemed destined to put them all out of business. TOKYO: Back in early April, during that brief phase when lockdown felt more like an unexplored alien planet than the inescapable traffic jam it soon became, I called Japan’s biggest karaoke operators to see what they made of it all.
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