This is a good work, Gary, I think your specific manner to sing songs and the backing provided by an arranger gives people joy and optimism, which made you a demanded performer.

Since many musicians perform with backing tracks (mainly singers), the word "karaoke" doesn't really say that much; with good singing and good sound people accept it.

There's a restaurant at my building, sometimes a whole jazz band plays there, but more often there's just a saxophonist or a singer plays over backing tracks, for financial reasons.

In Russia people played and sang with arrangers at restaurants, but they switched to backing tracks mostly because it sounded better (a lot of backing tracks are originals "borrowed" from original performers), I think the same thing happened in many countries.

The thing is that a lot of people don't really understand what a chord is and how it works, even if they listen to music a lot and attentively. They think something like that there's a melody and other sounds are random, keeping up with the tempo.

In the same time, thinking about players in an orchestra playing classical music I would admit that an arranger was designed so that playing would be more fun and less painful.

In the end, everything can be judged and misjudged. Perhaps people today are so overwhelmed with all the new things that are coming up, like artificial intelligence, I think it's luck to get noticed and to have some reaction.