EVEN MARGINALLY MIS-TIMED TEXT OR SWIPING

cannot make it through a karaoke night without crooning your way through “Mirrors”: the No Fly List only covers the U.S. In Toronto or London, you’re free to sing along to JT as you please.

Given these thorny ins and outs, it is perhaps not surprising that some bars and lounges have resorted to plundering their singalong wares illicitly. But Simmons is quick to point out that, as in many matters of bootlegging, quality ought to be considered aside cost or ease. “I was in a bar in Spain a couple of years ago, and the DJ was just playing karaoke videos from YouTube,” he laughs. “Dreadful quality. That’s a pretty lame way of running a karaoke show.” And for any bars or lounges that want to do it the right way after all? “Sunfly is open for business,” he says brightly. “Get in touch with me.”

Whether the crooning dilettante masses pay the quality of their karaoke experience much mind is perhaps debatable. A certain indiscriminate gusto has always been the hallmark of the pastime and, in the throes of a blotto barn-burner, one rarely feels too particular. Which may indeed be why the mechanics of karaoke remain for most of us so obscure. It’s in the nature of the entertainment for it to be soused and spontaneous, indulged in as revelry without much serious thought – taken for granted, in other words. For all the work that obviously goes into making karaoke music, we prefer to think of it as something that just materializes out of thin air.