Karaoke Joysound

» see kjw.joysound.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Joysound is one of the two big karaoke systems in Japan, the machine in the box room of the place you go with eight colleagues after work. In 2008 Hudson Soft licensed its song library and put the whole thing on a Wii. The retail version came in a box with a USB microphone and 70 songs already on the disc, but the internet connection was the actual product.

The business model was rental. You spent Nintendo Points on a track and kept it for anywhere between 24 hours and 90 days depending on what you paid. Xing's library was enormous and it lived on a server, so the disc in your console was really a client. You sang with a Mii or an avatar you had made, and the people not singing could pick up a Wii Remote and play cymbals at you.

It sold. Within six months of the December 2008 release the retail version had moved more than 250,000 copies in Japan, which for a karaoke game attached to a peripheral is a serious number. Versions kept coming through 2009 and 2010, a DX edition first and a Super DX at the end of it. Karaoke at home is a Japanese habit in a way it has never been in Turkey, where singing together is something that happens at a table with other people's instruments rather than in a living room with a rented backing track.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed elsewhere ~

Konami bought Hudson Soft in 2011 and announced a North American release the following January. It arrived on 30 October 2012, with an English-language library bolted on in place of the Japanese one, sold as a disc or as a microphone bundle. In July 2014 it quietly reappeared as a WiiWare download in North America, published by Brother International, with no announcement of any kind.

There was a PlayStation 3 branch too. Namco Bandai released Joysound Dive in Japan in November 2011 against a library of around 90,000 songs, and it holds a small piece of trivia: it is one of only two region-locked PS3 games ever made, the other being Persona 4 Arena. Sony removed it from the store on 31 October 2014, a year before the Wii service followed.

~ the day it died ~

Konami posted the termination notice on 18 May 2015. The last day you could buy a song was 21 July, and the service itself stopped on 29 October 2015. Every outstanding rental expired that day and the library stopped answering.

~ what got buried with it ~

The discs are all still out there and they all still boot. What you get is the 70 tracks that were pressed onto the retail version in 2008 and a store that returns nothing. Secondhand copies still sell with the microphone attached, and the microphone works exactly as it did in 2008.

Xing did not stop. Karaoke Joysound for Nintendo Switch shipped in Japan in December 2017, built by the same company, and it is still being updated. The line survived. The Wii one is the one with a date on it.

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