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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

I came here with that question, why don't they call this karaoke?

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.

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Cause Karaoke has cheesy or corny perception. Have you ever seen those cringe looking karaoke CD compilations of famous songs. They always look cheap.

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.

Even to an introvert like me, the cheesiness and being corny is part of what makes karaoke so good, it has an automatic atmosphere where you are allowed to do badly because we can all laugh at ourselves.

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

for me, I can't sing along if it's not close to the original because my brain remembers every tick of the original and wants to match the key of the original as well.

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 can't sing along if it's not close to the original because my brain remembers every tick of the original and wants to match the key of the original as well.

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.

> 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.

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.

Interestingly they don't even use the word カラオケ even in the Japanese press release, even though karaoke is massively popular in Japan.

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

It's probably if they use the word カラオケ, that might cause inherent expectation of what services would feature, like mic echo, scoring, ranking, etc., that's most of major karaoke apps, even on mobile platform would feature.

They're adding it to Apple Music for no extra cost this time though.

Apple literally owns a show called Carpool Karaoke

what do you expect from a company that invented the pencil?

Disagree. The reason is that they would get laughed out of court if they tried to trademark karaoke, whereas now they own one of the most common words in the English language. If you had or were planning to make an app called 'Sing along' or 'Sing with me' or suchlike, get ready for a scary legal letter from Apple's trademark lawyers.

IANAL but Karaoke has been trademarked in different decades in different countries. Most of those trademarks are considered "Abandoned" according to the few databases I skimmed in a brief search, but that covered only a couple of countries.

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.)

I spent a couple years on the YouTube Music team, adjacent to the folks who handled the nightmare that is music rights and licensing.

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.

This sort of ultra-divided and litigious licensing rights regime that I suspect is why music hasn't yet had a GPT-3/DALLe style machine learning breakthrough that has captured the public's imagination.

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.

It's "simply" an "AI" EQ preset adjuster using the existing licensing/sale/broadcast rights. /s

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.

> …why don't they call this karaoke?

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

> Adjustable vocals: Users now have control over a song’s vocal levels. They can sing with the original artist vocals, take the lead, or mix it up on millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog.

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.

When I think karaoke, I think microphone. It appears this makes no use of a microphone or captures the singer's vocals in any way, it just isolates the instrumental tracks and eliminates or reduces the vocal track.

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.

And yet most media coverage I can find of the Apple Music Sing release uses the word karaoke to describe it, thinking that will be clear to their readers. I would feel safe saying your opinion is a minority one.

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.

The whole point is that you can sing with it, which implies it can capture your voice in some way, even if you aren't holding a microphone.

Singing with something doesn't imply anything about capture. It's just saying that I can sing along to songs without the original vocal while I'm washing the dishes in the kitchen or whatever.

Which will be your phone in version 2, with a little software magic to retune discordant voices prior to the reverb.

Some "karaoke versions" of songs you can find are literally the same recording with the audio unmixed. Carefully listening can pick up some of the vocals from the other microphones.

Total speculation, but maybe Apple focus grouped it and saw karaoke has some corny/cringy implicit associations so they wanted some distance

Doesn't appear to be karaoke because I'm assuming it doesn't take your voice and throw it into the mix.

Probably because they're trying to push the "Apple Music Sing" branding, even though everyone will call it karaoke anyways.

Sing Different.

It's what the marketing machine at Apple does.

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