To enable an information providing apparatus, having received request information from a requesting apparatus, to make the provision of information corresponding to the request information realized as much as possible.

A karaoke device periodically sends mask data to the requesting apparatus, which after receiving the sent mask data, updates and stores the mask data if the mask data need to be updated. Then when characters to be retrieved are inputted, the requesting apparatus 2 displays a retrieval result by using stored request musical piece data and mask data. When the mask data are mask data for a 1st karaoke apparatus 1a, the retrieval result is displayed as it is since there is not data to be masked. When the mask data are mask data for a 2nd karaoke apparatus 1b, on the other hand, since the mask data are objects to mask, for example, selected music numbers 2 and 5, the song names to be masked in the retrieval result are not displayed.