Mini-KTV booths hit 56,000 units by 2017 — copyright suits and rent ended the boom

Single- and two-person soundproof karaoke booths — brands like 友唱M-bar (backed by vending-machine operator 友宝), 咪哒miniK (backed by 唱吧) and 雷石科技's 哇屋WOW, which raised a ¥200 million Series B in 2018 — spread through Chinese malls and cinema lobbies from 2016, riding the same sharing-economy enthusiasm as bike-sharing. Installed units grew from roughly 36,000 in 2016 to 56,000 in 2017, with one research firm projecting the market would reach ¥12.17 billion by 2019.

The economics looked simple: a machine cost roughly ¥20,000–36,000, needed almost no staff, and could run all day on mall foot traffic. What operators underpriced was the recurring cost of the songs — music-copyright fees of roughly ¥2,400–3,000 per unit per year — and the rent for the square meter a booth occupied, which rose from ¥1,000–3,000 a month to as high as ¥20,000 in prime downtown malls as demand for good spots intensified. By 2021, litigation records showed hundreds of legal cases against the leading operators, driven substantially by copyright and contract disputes.

A typical machine grossed only around ¥100 a day in an average location, and fewer than 1% of installed units were reported as genuinely profitable. Used machines that had cost ¥20,000–36,000 new were being resold secondhand for ¥5,000–6,000, some for a few hundred yuan, as malls replaced empty booths with convenience stores and other tenants. COVID-19 in 2020 accelerated the die-off further.