OMG, people. I have finally struck gadget gold in the neverending quest to fill my closet with the most amount of useless crap.
A little back story… Recently I had the pleasure of visiting a Japanese hostess bar right here in London. It isn’t as dodgy as one might think. It was actually a bar where nice Japanese girls served me drinks while myself and some male friends sang really, really bad karaoke. This whole experience woke up the inner Japanese in me and made me realise that despite having a voice that croons like a dog in heat, I actually like karaoke.
Yesterday, I was perusing one of my favourite geek sites, Firebox.com, looking at all the geeky toys I could potentially waste my money on own when I came across the Lucky Voice Home Karaoke Box.
Immediately I was curious. Not only did it say karaoke, but it also had a pink mic. Hm. So, how does it work was my next question… I decided to order it for a mere £49.95 to find out.
Firebox is so totally awesome, that although I ordered regular post which was supposed to take 2-3 days, my package arrived after 1 day, just in time for the weekend.
For those of you not familiar with London, Lucky Voice is actually a chain of karaoke bars (currently 2) in central London. They are set up Japanese styley with booths and are pretty much packed every night of the week with drunken revelers. As it turns out, Lucky Voice was founded by Martha Lane Fox, one of the founders of Lastminute.com. This might play a factor in the fun web element that I will get to in a minute.
The packaging for the kit was nice and simply branded in the style of Lucky Voice. Inside was an easy to follow diagram for how to plug in the mixer and a voucher for a free month of premium songs on the site.
So, what is all the magic?
The beauty of this kit is it gives you the hardware to have a fun karaoke party, but the song bit is all hosted online at www.luckyvoice.com. Super clever idea!
The site is cute and easy to use and has some surprisingly good functionality such as the ability to create playlists. You can also create parties where you invite your friends, chat, share photos and even see the list of songs you sang! How cool is that?!?
And once you have created your playlist / invited friends to your par-tay?
You click and off you go, full screen lyrics with the music playing.
Lucky Voice do a good job of upselling you to their Premium Sing by tempting you with a few freebie tracks (1,000 to be exact). They have a decent pricing strategy with different packages that include:
- 24 hours of premium – £3.99
- 1 month of premium – £7.99
All payable by Paypal. Easy peasy. This makes it reasonably priced if you were going to host a karaoke evening and didn’t want to be locked into a month. Good thinking.
Enough of me loving this thing in a blog post, I must go back to my Abba songs. Get one of these boxes and have a great time!!!
