Karaoke Trend in Japan

Last month, when I went to Yumekukan for karaoke to celebrate Aibon's news, I blogged about my experience there, and some comments about the place. The owner of Yumekukan found my blog from Yahoo and sent an email to me in response about it. With his permission, here it is:

Dear Jinryuichi san,

Greeting from Karaoke Yumekukan.
I appreciate you have introduced our Karaoke.

Further to your comment, I would like to explain Karaoke
trend in Japan.

8 Tracks -> Laser Disc-> VCD/LCD -> Tsushin Karaoke

As media changes, their music format also changed.
Normally Japanese Karaoke maker always appeal their number
of songs. So, to achieve this, they have to think how to
save memory, or how to compress data.
That is why you don't see original singer in BGV(back
ground video). Music-MIDI, BGV-mpeg

But now, as HDD capacity increases, many companies tried
to put more original pictures as BGV. But in reality, I
don't see any problems in business because most of
customers are used to our system exactly as same as in
Japan. Off course, if you really pursue the quality, LD
and DVD is better, but the matter of capacity and no one
utilize these media for commercial use.

Somehow I see the Karaoke culture difference between
Japanese and Chinese. In Japan, we don't have
Analogue/Digital concept. No voice is recorded in Karaoke
media. Whereas Chinese/English Karaoke have voice and you
can switch as you know.

I hope this can help you to understand more about Japanese
Karaoke and really appreciate your support.
And I enjoyed viewing Japanese artist info.

Best regards,
Yoshihiro Muneyasu
Karaoke Yumekukan

So now I understand. Quite interesting, indeed. If you are in Malaysia, and you wanna try Japanese Karaoke, please give Yumekukan a visit. Perhaps you can test your Nihongo there. ^_^

My advice, try the slower songs first, because even I had hard time singing Orange Range and Pierrot songs. It's fine if you're familiar with only anime songs, they have section dedicated entirely to that. There's also English songs there too, but not as much as Japanese.

Enjoy! \(^o^)/