About
Patron Saint of "New Singers First" rotation. Sayoko Umehara
It Begins
In the late 90's toqer (real name withheld to protect the innocent, and it was 1998) started going to a karaoke bar with his friend Sakebomber. The two of them hammed it up nightly, singing until the wee hours of the morning. Larping as "The Rat Pack" toqer covered Dean Martin songs, while Sakebomber did the Sinatra. They spent 6 months going out nightly.
Sakebomber being of Japanese descent found a quiet little watering hole in called 7 Bamboo in Japantown San Jose. At the time, it wasn't well known outside of the older Japanese crowd that frequented it, and the occasional high school crowd that knew all Sayoko wanted was their cash. What it lacked in modern amenities it made up for in one thing... 7 night a week karaoke.
After 6 months, toqer could not keep up with Sakebomber, and sadly the rat pack schtikt had to be tabled for a while.
In 2000 toqer was laid off like many people were during the first dot com crash. After 6 months of looking, and not even getting a callback he went back to the one place he had some good memories. Toshi (Sayoko's husband) offered him a job. After a few years he graduated to running karaoke, and a few years after that in 2004, introduced the world to the 7 Bamboo via nullsoft streaming video. Even the New York Times wrote about it.
Yes that's actually the aged, original clipping.
Being friends with the Winamp Crew, toqer was always influenced by Winamp. How clean it was. How extensible. How slick. He had an idea, "Let's Turn winamp into a karaoke system!" and that is how "The sausage is made in the back" so to speak.
Toqer Circa 2004, "THE WORLDS MOST DANGEROUS KARAOKE GEEK"
His first bit of software was a visual basic app that just unzipped mp3+g to a temp directory. From there he could edit the ID3 tags to show singer names. Thus "FREEKARAOKE" was born, bearing the image of Rick James.
I RUN KARAOKE NOW BITCH!
It was also during this time that the Patron Saint of "Sayoko Rotation" screamed the words, "BOBBAY! YOU PUT NEW SINGERS FIRST! THEN THEY STAY LONGER! AND BUY MORE BEER!" Thus, Sayoko made a decree that day that would forever influence QUP development.
Clan of the Caveman
That same year a mysterious man showed up. He only spoke 2 words "ZuGzUg", but man could he code.
ZuGzUg the first day at 7 Bamboo
While ZuGzUg was way above toqer's level intellectually, they managed to communicate through a series of hand gestures, grunts, and watching old Star Trek episodes. ZuGzUg would craft what would become the worlds first karaoke rotation plugin for Winamp, ml_autokdj.
Designed to mow down wave after wave of karaoke singers.
Combined with a kiosk, the crowd LOVED it. They were no longer bound by guesswork rotation from a pitiful human mind. Instead a cold calculating computer would methodically and fairly reproduce a predictable rotation. The entire playlist was projected on the wall for all to see, and there was clues about why some songs were placed as they were.
The whole god damn playlist? Not just the next 3 singers? Are you nuts?
This lead to another phenomenon. People would stay. If they knew their song was guaranteed to play, and could see it advancing up the playlist, then they had no reason to leave. The bar started making money hand over fist.
Act 3 - KJ Fubar: Finally using better Automated Rotation
A few years had passed and the effect of the live stream, fair karaoke, and diverse crowd could not be shaken, but then...
Hadoukening out of nowhere KJ Fubar wasn't even in San Jose. He had never even been to 7 Bamboo, but he watched the stream, and understood what we were doing, and understood something we knew, but didn't have the guts to do.
Winamp was not scalable. It was not a long term option.
With the precision of a Beverly Hills Plastic Surgeon, Fubar carved the elements that were best out of the winamp plugin - without making it a botched surgery. Instantly everything ran better, with less random crashes. Fubar added a few new features, rewrote the kiosks, and setup much of what we see in today's QUP. He had features planned that we would have loved to have seen. We owe him a lot for his legacy.
Epilogue
After many years of the system sitting dormant, toqer decided it was time again to bring this once great system back to life, update it with a modern sheen and present it for the 2025's.
Toqer today is a different man than he was 13 years ago. He had to leave the KJ industry, because he felt it was more important that he was there to give his kids a hug and kiss goodnight, than to sling songs out of a karaoke bar. Which is noble. There are some things in life that are more important than karaoke, but not many.
Toqer still has great hair, a bit more grey, loves Corgi's, and has been known to organize Corgi meetups in Silicon Valley. He continues the QUP legacy to this day.
