August Karaoke Box — Attraction in Tempe

I am very disappointed. Maybe I’m spoiled because I’ve been to karaoke places in Japan and China where the service is so much better when really it’s just the standard. But holy hell, the experience here at August Karaoke Box was an absolute joke, and it’s all entirely on their terrible service and terrible karaoke system.

Songs are extremely limited. “Due to copyright” they don’t have any actual instrumental or karaoke versions of songs, we basically have to sing over the original songs. That’s no fun, isn’t the whole point of karaoke to sing the song yourself, if I wanted to just play the original song, I would just sing at home or in the car while driving.

You can connect to YouTube or Spotify, yeah, only if you have an Apple iPhone, so half my friends couldn’t use this. Not to mention, the wifi connection was so bad, half the songs was constantly interrupted by buffering issues. On YouTube, we spent over 30 minutes trying to get one song to play before we just gave up and used the song list preprogrammed on their machine, which took another 5 minutes before many of us finally found a song to sing because of the unnecessarily complicated navigation system they had. I’ll give them one thing, At least twice because of all the trouble we were having the staff were kind enough to adjust the time so we could actually get 2 hours.

Unfortunately, even with the extensions, we only managed to sing 2-3 songs each, which again, thanks to my experience at karaoke places in Asia, we could have gotten well more than 4-5 songs each with a group of 8 people.

This was truly such a painful and off putting experience, and costed us $146, way more than expected for just two hours. It’s not per person either. I’m guessing it’s all the hidden licensing fees for the songs that none of us can even sing is how they’re getting their money.

Really disappointed. Don’t bother with this place. Just go to YouTube, search for your favorite karaoke/instrumental versions of the songs you like and do it at home, oh right, because they’ll block the karaoke versions there as well....

I could not have been more excited to visit this karaoke place for my 34th birthday and I could not have been more disappointed by my experience.

I came here with a group of 12 friends to celebrate on a Saturday night. My husband and I did our due diligence and went to look at the venue and different room options and reserved our private karaoke room about a month in advance (yes, I'm that type of planner). When we went to check it out initially, we met the OWNER and had a really nice chat about him and his business. Coincidentally, we both lived in NYC for a time. I let him know that we were booking this room for my birthday and I'd done a fair amount of karaoke in my time, and private room karaoke is my favorite. I asked about song selection and he ASSURED ME that he had every song and we would have a great time.

Cut to tonight, my friends and I all show up and go into our room (which was supposed to accommodate 15, but our 12 was SNUG) and started navigating the tablet/computer and looking to add songs. And I kid you not, the first 10 songs we wanted to sing, THEY DIDN'T HAVE. And we're not talking about obscure German rap songs, just fun, normal karaoke songs. To give you an idea of some of the songs NOT AVAILABLE, here's a short list:

-Piano Man by Billy Joel (actually there are no Billy Joel songs at all) -Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen -I Wanna Dance with Somebody by Whitney Houston -Anything by Frank Sinatra

WE WERE NOT ASKING TOO MUCH FOR THESE SONGS. I went to speak to the owner and he made it seem as though I simply needed a tutorial on how to use the system. He walked me through it, and every song I suggested wasn't there. He just looked at me and asked for another song suggestion. I WAS FURIOUS. I let him know how upset I was, but all he could do was shrug. If I had known they basically only have Bruno Mars songs, I would have planned to go somewhere else.

We ended up making the best of it, and he did give us a small discount, but in the end, I'm still upset and I will certainly...

My friend (Maid of Honor) booked this place for my bachelorette party. Our experience was terrible! I am only giving it one star because it was clean and song selection was okay. Our problem was how rude we were treated by staff. We were intruperrupted by the staff multiple times with other customers saying they had left items behind. When coming in they swung the door open, almost hitting my mother several times. We told staff and the other customers that the room had been clean and was empty upon our arrival. However, we were still bothered. Staff or other customers, that staff never seemed to stop, tried to grab our stuff even though we had already said that the room was clean and emptied. So, I don’t understand why staff would allow previous customers to go check if they had cleaned the room. They should have been stopped from bothering us and told them that 1) the room had been cleaned and their stuff was not in there or 2) their stuff was in the room but had been collected upon cleaning. Anyway, we stayed trying to not let those thing completely ruin our night of fun. Then my maid of honor went to pay. The lady at the front desk was talking to someone that appeared to be a friend and not a customer, so she politely asked if she could pay. The front desk lady, rudely, said she will be with her in a second and continued her conversation. Once she was finally finished, she said “you have cash right? We prefer cash” My maid of honor said No. The front desk lady then looked at my mother expecting her to have cash and pay. Mind you, there was no sign anywhere saying they prefer cash nor were any of us told that the company preferred cash. Finally, she unwilling took the card from my friend. So, with that all being said, we will not be returning nor will we be recommending this place to ANYONE. No one deserves to be treated...