Microphone Emoji

A handheld microphone, drawn in the classic ball-grille style of a Shure SM58. 🎤 is the emoji for singing, performing, karaoke, public speaking, and the definitive "mic drop." It's the voice emoji you reach for when you're on stage, in your feelings at a karaoke bar, or ending a Twitter argument with a killer one-liner.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F3A4U+1F3A4 MICROPHONE, 🎤 is one of the original music emojis and has stayed remarkably stable across platforms. The design is cylindrical shaft, ball grille, no stand. Every major vendor draws it essentially the same way: an SM58 rendered as a pictograph. It's the mic you'd hand to a guest rapper. It's the mic Freddie Mercury would have pointed at the crowd.

🎤 covers a wider emotional range than most object emojis. On one end it's joyful, karaoke nights, birthday parties, someone's cousin belting a Céline Dion ballad at 11pm. On the other end it's confrontational, the "and I said that with my whole chest 🎤⬇️" mic drop that signals "there's nothing left to say after this." Both readings live in the same three-pixel-tall drawing, and context picks the meaning.

🎤 is deployed in at least five distinct ways across social media.

Karaoke and singing. Birthday parties, bachelorette trips, Korean karaoke rooms, and "found my new song 🎤" captions. Nearly universal across ages and languages.

Concert and performance culture. Musicians use 🎤 in tour promo, setlist tweets, and front-row selfies. K-pop fan communities are especially heavy users, where concert and fanmeet culture drives constant 🎤 usage. BTS titled an entire single "MIC Drop)" (2017), inspired directly by Obama.

The mic drop gesture. Ending a statement with 🎤⬇️ means "I just made a point so devastating there's no response." Originated in 1980s stand-up (Eddie Murphy's *Delirious* in 1983) and hip-hop (Eric B's "I Ain't No Joke" in 1987), revived into viral status by Obama's 2016 White House Correspondents' Dinner ("Obama out").

Public speaking and hosting. TEDx speakers, event MCs, wedding toast announcements. 🎤 signals "I'm taking the floor."

Podcasting. A softer use. Most podcast promos prefer 🎙️, but 🎤 still shows up in interview-style shows where a guest is being passed a handheld mic.

🎤 was approved in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 as U+1F3A4U+1F3A4 MICROPHONE, part of the first big emoji expansion from Japanese carrier sets to the global standard. CLDR short name: "microphone."

The visual reference is the Shure SM58, a dynamic vocal mic released in 1966 that became the global performance-mic standard. Unlike the retro-studio 🎙️, the SM58 is still the most common real-world handheld. Beyoncé, Mick Jagger, and basically every rock and pop vocalist have pointed one at a crowd. It's built to survive being dropped (hence mic-drop culture), which you can't say about most microphones.

Karaoke, the emoji's primary joyful use, also has a specific origin. In 1971, Daisuke Inoue, a 31-year-old drummer in Kobe, Japan, plugged an 8-track player into an amplifier and rented the setup (nicknamed "8 JUKE") to bars on a coin-op basis. The word "karaoke" means "empty orchestra." Inoue famously didn't patent his invention, so he never profited directly. In 2004, Harvard gave him the Ig Nobel Peace Prize "for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."

The "mic drop" gesture has its own lineage. Eddie Murphy dropped a mic in his 1983 HBO special Delirious, after responding to a heckler. Hip-hop picked it up: the earliest explicit reference in rap lyrics is Eric B & Rakim's 1987 track "I Ain't No Joke." Then in 2012, Obama performed a staged mic drop with Jimmy Fallon, and in 2016 he ended his final White House Correspondents' Dinner with an improvised "Obama out" drop that became instantly iconic. BTS's RM has said the group's "MIC Drop" single) was directly inspired by Obama's gesture.

1. 1966[Shure SM58](https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/sm58) launches. Becomes the global handheld vocal mic and the visual reference for 🎤.
2. 1971[Daisuke Inoue invents the first karaoke machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisuke_Inoue) in Kobe, Japan, the "8 JUKE." He never patents it.
3. 1983Eddie Murphy drops the mic in *Delirious*, one of the [earliest recorded mic drops](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mic-drop) in comedy.
4. 1987[Eric B & Rakim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mic_drop) reference the gesture in "I Ain't No Joke," cementing it in hip-hop vocabulary.
5. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as `U+1F3A4` MICROPHONE.↗
6. 2016[Obama's "Obama out" mic drop](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-obama-drops-the-mic-at-final-white-house-correspondents-dinner) at the White House Correspondents' Dinner goes viral. The 🎤⬇️ combo becomes standard social shorthand.↗
7. 2016[Google ships the Gmail Mic Drop button](https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/01/google-reverses-gmail-april-1-prank-after-users-mistakently-put-gifs-into-important-emails/) as an April Fools' prank. It appends a minion-with-mic GIF and mutes replies. Pulled within hours after users accidentally use it on funeral announcements and job applications.↗
8. 2017BTS releases ["MIC Drop"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mic_Drop_(song)), directly inspired by Obama. The Steve Aoki remix with Desiigner goes global.↗

• •🎤's design is based on the Shure SM58, released in 1966 and still the most-used handheld vocal mic in the world. Built tough enough to survive being dropped, which is why "mic drop" works as a gesture at all.
• •Karaoke was invented by Daisuke Inoue in Kobe, Japan in 1971. He never patented it and made nothing from the industry it launched. Harvard gave him the 2004 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to global tolerance.
• •The mic-drop gesture traces back to Eddie Murphy's *Delirious* (1983) and Eric B & Rakim's 1987 track "I Ain't No Joke." Obama's 2016 "Obama out" brought it into global viral culture.
• •On April 1, 2016, Google shipped a Gmail "Mic Drop" button. It added a minion GIF and muted replies. Users sent it with funeral arrangements, job applications, and boss emails. Google pulled it within hours and apologized: "Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves."
• •BTS's 2017 single "MIC Drop") was directly inspired by Obama's 2016 speech. RM told allkpop: "The mic drop by former President Obama after his speech went viral. It's a song that includes our swag, ambition, and confidence."
• •The Shure SM58 turned 60 in 2026 and is still in production essentially unchanged. Beyoncé, Mick Jagger, Bono, and Adele have all used one on stage.
• •🎤 is one of the most-used emojis in K-pop fan accounts. Concert and fanmeet culture drives extremely heavy usage: tour dates, ticket drops, selfie threads, stan reactions all lean on 🎤.
• •The Philippines is widely called the karaoke capital of the world. Home karaoke machines are so common they're considered standard household equipment, including in rural areas. The Filipino-invented Magic Sing karaoke microphone sold millions across Asia in the 2000s.
• •The global podcast industry is worth roughly $40 billion in 2025, up from $30B the year before, on track to hit $131B by 2030. 584 million people listen globally; 158 million in the US alone. YouTube is now the #1 podcast platform with ~33% share, ahead of Spotify and Apple Podcasts, which is why you see 🎤 in interview-show captions more than ever.
• •China has over 100,000 karaoke bars, the most of any country. South Korea has been on the opposite trajectory: public karaoke bars (noraebang) have declined from ~17,200 in 2005 to a much smaller count today as home and mobile karaoke took over.
• •Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' has topped Lucky Voice's annual UK karaoke rankings almost every year since they started counting. Neil Diamond's 'Sweet Caroline' beats it as a stadium sing-along because the entire crowd gets to do the 'BA BA BAA' part.

• •Obama's "Obama out" mic drop at the 2016 White House Correspondents' Dinner. The most-watched political mic drop in history.
• •BTS's "MIC Drop" (2017)). Steve Aoki remix with Desiigner. Global K-pop breakthrough, directly inspired by Obama.
• •Eddie Murphy's *Delirious* (1983), widely cited as one of the first recorded mic drops in comedy.
• •Google's Gmail Mic Drop disaster (April 1, 2016). An accidentally cruel April Fools' that lived for about three hours.
• •Kobe Bryant's "Mamba out" (April 2016). Kobe dropped the mic at his retirement game a few weeks before Obama, and Obama explicitly referenced it.

• •🎤 is a single codepoint: U+1F3A4U+1F3A4. No variation selector needed. Renders the same as a colored emoji across all major platforms.
• •Discord, Slack, and GitHub shortcode: :microphone::microphone:.
• •Many karaoke and live-event apps use 🎤 as the "record" or "stage" icon. Pairs well with 🎶 for "song choice" and 👥 for "audience."

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.