How DAM and JOYSOUND Came to Dominate Karaoke in Japan

If you walk into a karaoke box in Japan, you’ll almost certainly be greeted by one of two logos: DAM or Joysound.

DAM and Joysound are essentially the only two suppliers of karaoke systems in Japan, in an industry that peaked at nearly 1.3 trillion yen in 1996, and still brings in hundreds of billions of yen today.

Their products include the machines in the room, the networks that deliver the songs, and the huge song libraries that allow you to sing anything your heart desires, from 90s J-pop, the latest anime openings, to obscure indie music.

It wasn’t always like this. Karaoke was invented in the late 1960s, and over the years has come in various forms, including physical tape decks, LaserDiscs, and phone lines. The market went through phases of growth and decline, but saw its absolute peak in the 1990s, with over a dozen companies competing for a piece of the karaoke pie.

So how did we end up with just two karaoke companies remaining?

How karaoke started in Japan

A box with a coin slot

It all began in 1967 with an engineer named Shigeichi Negishi, who ran a small electronics company in Tokyo. After his colleague called him a bad singer, Negishi figured he would sound better if he had a backing track and a microphone. He and his team started working on a prototype.

The very first karaoke machine was a box with an 8-track tape player, mixer, and mic. Negishi also added a coin slot and timer, so owners could charge customers 100 yen for 10 minutes of singing. The device was named the “Sparko Box” and sold several thousand units before Negishi left the business. He never patented the idea.

Other inventors tinkered with similar ideas, and karaoke machines started popping up around bars and entertainment venues across Japan. They were quite primitive by today’s standards, as they could only store a limited number of songs, and didn’t play videos or lyrics on a screen. There were also no private “box” type venues yet, so users would sing in a room full of other patrons.

But the machines did their job:they let people sing along to background music and have a good time.

Discs, screens, and lyrics

Big upgrades came in the 80s. Pioneer released a LaserDisc karaoke player, which could display lyrics and background videos on a TV screen. The discs could store many more songs, and could jump straight to any requested song since there was no tape to rewind.

So now it was possible to enjoy a larger song catalogue, as long as there was a machine and some discs available. Pioneer’s first model could hold 20 discs, each one storing 10 songs. That’s 200 songs total on one device, and while it pales in comparison to the 350,000+ songs available on modern machines, it was revolutionary for its time.

This set the stage for the “karaoke box” venue, which also had a surprisingly humble start, as they were initially literally boxes. In 1985, a truck driver named Yoichi Sato converted old freight containers into private singing rooms, and lined them up on an empty lot. It was called the Yellow Box Karaoke Plaza, and is considered the very first of Japan’s private karaoke venues.

The idea caught on fast, since it gave people a way to sing to their hearts’ content without disturbing the neighbors or being surrounded by strangers. In 1988, a company called Daiichi Kosho opened the first location of what would become one of Japan’s biggest karaoke chains: Big Echo.

Going online

There was still one big problem: every song had to be stored on a physical disc, and every disc had to be manufactured, shipped, and kept on location. Disc storage was limited, and adding new songs meant waiting for new discs to be produced and shipped around the country.

The long-awaited solution arrived in 1992: networked karaoke (通信カラオケ, tsuushin karaoke). Instead of playing songs from a disc, karaoke machines could now download song data from a central server via phone lines. Taito launched the X2000 first, and a new company called Xing soon followed, releasing Joysound later that year. Then in 1994, Daiichi Kōshō entered the race with DAM, installing it in their Big Echo locations around the country.

As you can imagine, sending audio files over a 1992 phone line would have been painfully slow. A single four-minute song in CD quality is around 42 MB, which would have taken anywhere from 10 to 40 hours to download, since modems at the time had transfer speeds ranging from 2,400 to 9,600 bps.

So the systems didn’t send audio at all; they used MIDI instead. A song sent as MIDI data might be around 50 KB, small enough to arrive in under a minute on faster modems.

MIDI is a standardized format, so any machine will play the same notes at the same time, but each synthesizer has its own idea of what a “piano” or “guitar” sounds like. That’s one reason the same song can sound noticeably different on DAM and Joysound.

These MIDI files were tiny and easy to stream, which made it possible to implement the modern “on-demand” system, in which users can request any available song and have it delivered immediately.

The technology has evolved since then, with broadband making it possible to deliver higher-quality audio and full-motion videos. But the core idea is still the same: a central server holds the catalogue, and the machines in each room pull from it. That’s essentially the same logic behind streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, except it came decades earlier.

How karaoke song catalogs are made

Karaoke machines play MIDI data, rather than the original recordings. That means someone has to create the MIDI data for every single song. But who actually does it, and how?

How karaoke music is made

Most of the work is handled by specialized production companies that contract with karaoke operators. The process goes something like this:

1. A technician listens to the original recording and transcribes it by ear, note by note, for every instrument.
2. They take the lyrics and manually place timing markers so the text highlights in sync with the melody.
3. They double-check the kanji readings, because many songs bend the rules. An artist might write 本気 (honki, serious) but sing it as maji. Or they might write 宇宙 (uchuu, space) but sing sora (sky). Since the lyrics onscreen are supposed to match what’s actually sung, some poor soul has to find every single instance of these irregular readings.

As you can imagine, this is highly-skilled work and just as time-consuming as it sounds. Now multiply that workload by hundreds of thousands of songs, plus a constant stream of new releases that customers expect to see right away.

Even today, the workflow is largely the same as it was in the 90s. Many popular songs now use real recorded audio or higher-quality backing tracks when available, but MIDI is still the foundation for a huge portion of the catalogue.

Karaoke licensing laws

Then there’s the legal side. In Japan, the rights to most songs are managed by JASRAC, the country’s largest music copyright organization. A smaller organization called NexTone manages some as well. JASRAC holds the rights to both Japanese and non-Japanese songs alike, as they have agreements with over 129 overseas music copyright organizations.

The rights are split into two layers:

• Karaoke operators like Daiichi Kosho and Xing sign licenses that cover distributing song data to venues. These require paying a base fee, plus a percentage of the earnings received from the karaoke venues that pay for the DAM/Joysound machines.
• Each karaoke venue also signs its own separate contract with JASRAC that covers the actual performance, meaning customers singing the songs. The rates are calculated by the number of rooms and the size of each room. A standard room accommodating up to 10 customers costs 4,000 yen per month. A larger party room accommodating up to 50 guests costs 12,000 yen per month. For example, a venue with 20 standard rooms and one party room would cost: 20 × 4,000 yen + 1 × 12,000 yen = 92,000 yen per month.

Here’s the catch: those licenses only cover the song’s composition and lyrics, and not the original recordings. The actual audio tracks belong to the record labels, and using them would require negotiating with the labels directly. This is the other big reason (besides file size) operators recreate everything in MIDI: they simply don’t have the rights to use the original audio.

Major songs do often feature real instrumental tracks (生音演奏, namaoto-ensou). These are not the original audio tracks, but rather are re-recorded by session musicians hired by the karaoke companies.

Where do karaoke background videos come from?

The same goes for music videos. Using an artist’s official music video (本人映像, honnin eizou) requires separate negotiations and pricing, so most songs don’t have one.

Instead, we get those quirky background videos that you’ve definitely seen before if you’ve done karaoke in Japan. These could include anything from a slightly melodramatic clip of a couple walking along a beach, to a woman gazing out a train window, to slow touristy shots of downtown Nashville.

The videos are made by production companies that handle location scouting, casting, filming, and editing. The people featured in them are a mix of working actors and models, and regular people who responded to open casting calls. Many of these videos are loosely matched to a certain mood rather than made for one specific song.

Background videos go back to the LaserDisc era, when karaoke machines first got screens. It’s not entirely clear where the idea came from, but it’s likely that they were simply added to make the experience more immersive. A bare screen with nothing but lyrics would feel pretty empty, especially during instrumental breaks when there are no lyrics to show.

But it is clear why the videos are so . . . generic. Here are a few good reasons:

• The actual singer is supposed to be the star of the show. The video shouldn’t pull attention away from the person holding the mic.
• The lyrics need to be easy to read. This is why the videos avoid fast camera movements, frequent cuts, flashing lights, and any on-screen text that could compete with the lyrics.
• The videos need to be usable long-term. A single video might be used for years across many different songs, so they avoid anything that would visibly date them, like specific fashion trends or recognizable phone models.

How DAM and JOYSOUND won the karaoke wars

Networked karaoke was a huge hit. Throughout the 90s, many companies competed in the industry. Along with Xing and Daiichi Kosho (who developed Joysound and DAM, respectively), there were quite a few other big names like Taito, JVC, Pioneer, Sega, and USEN.

But by the 2000s, the market was shrinking. One by one, competitors either exited or got absorbed by other businesses. And by 2011, there were only two survivors.

Xing: The underdog

Xing’s Joysound system was actually born from a failed business idea.

It was set up by Brother Industries, a company better known for sewing machines and printers. Back in 1986, Brother had launched TAKERU, a vending machine for PC software. The idea was that instead of ordering and stocking tons of floppy disks, PC shops could have a TAKERU machine download software over a phone line and write it to a disk right there in the store.

It was a great idea, but the project didn’t end up being profitable. Xing mentions in its own account of Joysound’s history that their big turning point came when a music school asked to sell a catalogue of around 3000 MIDI songs through TAKERU. That got the team thinking: “Wait, if our system can send small music files to machines all over the country, what else could we do with it?”

The answer, of course, was karaoke. Yuichi Yasutomo, the lead engineer behind TAKERU, took the infrastructure he had already built and pivoted it into a full-fledged karaoke system. He and his teammates founded Xing and launched its first machine, the JS-1, in 1992.

Daiichi Kosho: The veteran

Daiichi Kosho, the creator of DAM, was a totally different story. That company was already deep in the karaoke scene, and had been selling karaoke equipment and operating the Big Echo chain since the pre-network days.

They already had an existing customer base, which gave them a huge head start when they launched the first DAM system.

Why DAM and JOYSOUND became Japan’s dominant karaoke systems

There are a lot of reasons, but the biggest is that karaoke was their core business.

For companies like Pioneer, JVC, Sega, and Taito, karaoke was just one of many divisions. If karaoke stopped making money, that division could simply be sold or shut down, and the company would move on.

For most, that was exactly what happened. The karaoke market peaked in the mid-90s and then started a slow, gradual decline, for a few reasons:

• The bubble era had ended, leaving Japan with a stagnant economy.
• The heaviest karaoke users were students and youth in their 20s, a demographic that has been steadily declining in population.
• The internet, video game consoles, and other new forms of entertainment gave people more ways to spend their leisure time.

As the market shrank, karaoke became a less attractive business for the big conglomerates. But for Daiichi Kosho and Xing, walking away wasn’t an option, so they kept investing in karaoke. They focused hard on the most important aspect: song catalogues.

From a customer’s perspective, the logic is simple. If you’re picking a karaoke machine, you want the one that has all the songs you want to sing. Whichever brand has a bigger and more up-to-date catalogue wins. Meanwhile, a brand that falls behind loses customers, which means less money to spend on the catalogue, which means falling even further behind.

Both companies also made some bold business moves when it mattered. In 2001, Daiichi Kosho bought two record labels, Nippon Crown and Tokuma Japan Communications, giving it more control over music and licensing.

Meanwhile, Xing bought out its competitors. In 2006 it took over JVC and Taito’s karaoke businesses. Pioneer and Sega’s karaoke businesses were consolidated into a company called BMB, which in turn was acquired by Xing in 2010.

And with that, Daiichi Kosho and Xing were the last karaoke companies standing.

No room for new players

At this point, it’s incredibly hard for a newcomer to compete. You’d need hundreds of thousands of songs already in your catalogue, licensing agreements, nationwide infrastructure, and venues willing to take a chance on you.

Koshidaka, the company behind the massive Karaoke Maneki Neko chain, actually did try to break in. They launched their own in-house karaoke system called Sukitto. It was available at Maneki Neko locations, but shut down for good in December 2019. Even with a huge chain of its own to host the machines, Koshidaka still couldn’t keep up with DAM and Joysound.

Koshidaka hasn’t completely given up though—more on that later.

How Japan’s karaoke industry survived COVID-19

Karaoke’s most recent challenge was, of course, Covid-19. After all, karaoke boxes are small, enclosed rooms where people sing loudly at each other, which is just about the worst possible thing to do during a pandemic.

Many entertainment businesses didn’t survive, and the karaoke market lost around half its value, shrinking from about 348.5 billion yen in 2018 to around 174 billion yen in 2021.

To stay afloat, many chains leaned hard into marketing their rooms as private workspaces. Karaoke Kan, for example, offered weekday telework passes for 980 yen with drinks included. Joysound even added ambient “work BGM” tracks to its machines, the most popular one being a crackling fireplace.

Thankfully, the industry bounced back faster than a lot of people expected. By 2024, the market was on track to hit around 320 billion yen, close to pre-pandemic levels. Part of that was just people coming back, but some was that karaoke boxes found all sorts of new uses.

• Fan activities: Fans book rooms for their fan activities (推し活, oshikatsu). They can watch concerts, livestreams, and videos of their favorite idols and performers on a big screen, with a good sound system and no neighbors to worry about.
• Remote work: Although this was popularized during the pandemic, most major chains continue to offer plans for working or taking meetings in a private, quiet(ish) room.
• Solo karaoke (ヒトカラ, hitokara): Once considered a bit unusual, going to karaoke alone is now so normal that Koshidaka (Maneki Neko) runs a whole chain built specifically for solo singers, called Wankara (ワンカラ).

Inbound tourism has also been a big boost, especially in cities. Both of the big brands have noticed, and have been adding features to make Japanese songs easier for international visitors to sing, like romaji lyric displays and multilingual menus.

Speaking of which, what Japanese songs are tourists actually singing? Mostly anime songs! When Joysound looked at what international visitors sang in 2024, 20 of the top 30 Japanese tunes were anime songs, with A Cruel Angel’s Thesis from Evangelion and YOASOBI’s Idol at the top.

Challenging the status quo

While Koshidaka failed with their attempt with Sukitto in the Maneki Neko chain, the company hasn’t called it quits. They recently came back with another in-house system called E-bo, developed together with the company behind Pokekara, a popular karaoke app for smartphones. E-bo is now available in some Maneki Neko rooms, and its big selling point is letting you sing along with original artist recordings.

Although their market share is still tiny compared to DAM and Joysound, it’s an interesting sign that the duopoly isn’t going completely unchallenged.

Karaoke in Japan today

Singing outside the box

These days, you don’t even need to go to a karaoke box to sing. Both of the big players offer home versions of their systems.

Joysound has subscription-based apps for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, PC, and smart TVs. DAM has similar options on the PlayStation, PC, and smartphones. Since these run on devices most people already own, they’ve made dedicated home karaoke machines pretty much obsolete.

There’s also the aforementioned Pokekara (ポケカラ), which launched in 2018 and became Japan’s most popular karaoke app. It isn’t affiliated with DAM or Joysound, but comes with a big song library and social features like livestreaming, posting recordings, and joining virtual rooms with other users.

If you want to go even simpler, you can find karaoke versions of just about anything on YouTube, or turn on Apple Music’s karaoke mode. Hook that up to a cheap speaker and mic set, and you’ve got a DIY karaoke machine.

That being said, good old karaoke boxes with DAM and Joysound machines are likely still the most popular way to sing by a wide margin. NTT Docomo ran a survey in 2022 asking users where they usually sing karaoke, and 76.1% of the participants chose “at karaoke venues.” Only a small number answered “using my phone” or “using home devices.” Makes sense, since not everyone lives in a place where they can sing, scream, and shout at any hour of the day!

What modern machines can do

Modern karaoke machines can do a lot more than play a backing track and show the lyrics. They now include other features, like:

• Key change: Shift the whole song up or down to fit your vocal range.
• Tempo change: Speed the song up or slow it down.
• Echo: Add reverb to make your voice sound fuller (basically the “singing in the shower” effect).
• Voice effects: Make your voice sound higher, lower, younger, robotic, or like an anime character.
• Scoring: Usually turned off by default. When turned on, a live graph shows the song’s melody alongside what you’re actually singing, and you get a score at the end based on your accuracy and technique.
• Personalization: Singers can create accounts and load up their presets, personal bests, and favorite tracks.

Karaoke machines have also become an important marketing channel. New songs can show up in the catalogue as early as their release date. During idle time, when no one is singing, the TV screens play commercials, music videos, and promotions for new releases. Artists and labels can even run campaigns through karaoke, like giving people who sing songs from a new album the chance to win signed merchandise.

DAM vs JOYSOUND: Which karaoke machine should you pick?

DAM and Joysound’s current flagship models each have somewhere around 350,000 songs, with Joysound just slightly in the lead. Joysound has held the “bigger catalogue” title for longer overall, but it’s always been a close race.

The best karaoke company for casual users

For the average person, the differences are pretty small. In a nutshell:

• Pick DAM if you want to sing along to the artist’s official music video. DAM is generally known for having more real music video footage.
• Pick Joysound if you’re looking for something more niche. Since Joysound tends to have a bigger overall catalogue, you’re more likely to find lesser-known anime songs, Vocaloid tracks, and indie artists.

But honestly, you can’t go wrong with either.

The best karaoke company for serious singers

For hardcore karaoke fans, things get a bit more interesting thanks to personalization features and differences in scoring systems. Both brands let you create an account to track your score history, save your favorite songs, save recordings, and compete on rankings.

Joysound offers the core features for free. It does have a paid tier as well, but it’s mainly for convenience upgrades like expanded storage. Joysound’s scoring system is also known for being more forgiving, as it’s designed for people who just want to have a good time and walk away with a satisfying score. Average scores are often said to hover around 89.

DAM only offers basic features in their free tier, but paid tiers unlock a very advanced scoring system. The system is built for people who want to actually improve, so it’s much stricter than Joysound, and being even slightly off pitch will cost you points. It also analyzes things like vibrato and pitch stability, and gives you a detailed breakdown afterwards. Average DAM scores are usually said to be around 80 to 82.

So if you just want to have fun and get some nice features for free, go with Joysound. If you’re serious about working on your singing, DAM is the one for you.

Final thoughts

Karaoke was born 60 years ago as a single coin-operated box with a mic attached. Today, it’s a nationwide network with hundreds of thousands of songs, and a duopoly built by two companies that refused to give up on one of Japan’s most iconic pastimes. Although it certainly wasn’t a smooth ride, we have many brilliant engineers to thank for helping the technology evolve into what it is now.

Whether you’re team DAM or team Joysound, there’s a karaoke box waiting for you. Go grab some friends (or don’t) and sing your heart out!