Yesterday’s family night was taken to a whole new level of fun and laughter when we finally had an opportunity to crack out our new Roxi Electric Jukebox! We’ve had it for a few weeks, and have been dying to give it a go, but with our lack of WIFI it was frustratingly impossible!
We are all big music lovers and it makes me feel like somewhat of a successful parent to see my kids dancing to great tunes, and having a good old family sing song in the car. Music makes me so incredibly happy to hear; whether I am cleaning, blogging, chilling or dancing like a nutter to get rid of stress – Wherever we are we love to crank up our favourite tunes and enjoy music together, and its a great source of joy and family unity!
Roxi is all about sharing music together and this small little box (now plugged into our TV) holds hours of singing, dancing, relaxing and even family fun (or girls nights/couples nights) with music quizzes and its sing along feature. It is the key to various genres of music, each with thousands of songs, that range from our current faves of Moana and Trolls soundtracks, to Pop, Rock, Country and legends from the 80’s and 90’s. Whatever your mood or taste in music, it gives you access to your favourites using your homes WIFI! With voice activated searches we found it incredibly easy to pick out the next song, and either dance along, or use the singalong feature for a karaoke style family night activity.
What we Loved
Compact and looks nice – The box is pretty small and so doesn’t require moving things around to make room for it. Ours just sits next to the TV, but could quite easily slot behind it, or on top of the DVD player to be more discreet! The control is also the mic, so again it requires minimal space to store! This is also useful when we’ve had enough, or want to monitor it – we can hide it out of reach of the kids very quickly and easily!!!
When put into perspective, I think its so much better to have a tiny black box over shelves of CDs that with kids, get scratched like no other!
Easy to set up – Ethan and I set it up after school in about 5 minutes. We just plugged it into the HDMI and wall, and then it was self explanatory. We just had to put the WIFI password in and we were ready to roll!
Value for money – The initial cost is £199 which to us does seem quite a lot as we don’t often by gadgety things. This however includes the box (which plugs into your TV and connects to WIFI in order to give access to tunes), access to 10s of millions of songs, 1000’s of singalong songs, and music games for a year. Not to mention the hours of enhanced family time and laughs! A 12-month Premium Music Pass for the second year costs just £52 which is less than 5 quid a month for unlimited music and singing with the fam (or solo!). I think its reasonable.
Helps build confidence in kids – Ethan and Megan were so eager to grab the mic and perform and in the space of 2 or 3 songs, I saw them go from being a little awkward to letting loose and totally going for it. It was lovely to see their confidence booming as they performed to the family and each other.
Source of family fun and coming together – We don’t particularly have any issues with getting together as a family right now as the kids are still young. We have weekly family days out, family nights every Monday and movie nights, as well as the usual bedtime stories. This Roxi Jukebox however holds their attention more, is lots of fun so enhances the time we have together, and it also means we are interacting which doesn’t happen when you watch movies. We can stay in and chill together but still have quality time and fun, and I guess some musical education too!
We also think it will be a great reason to get extended family round for some musical fun too… we all loved singstar back in the day and this is just way more efficient.
AD Free music – unlike YouTube this means you can have songs, playlists or full albums at your fingertips without the annoyance of Ads or inappropriate pop ups. This on its own is worth it for a family home and where you just want music quickly!
Helps kids with their reading – There’s nothing like watching a screen with words to your favourite song to help your brain work quickly to decode and read them so you can perform well with the mic! We really feel like playing the sing along feature regularly as a family will not only be a lot of fun, but most certainly help them improve with their reading too.
Parental controls – My biggest fear was that we would have to monitor this. With having free access to so many songs, whilst a good thing, I worried that they might discover some lyrically inappropriate stuff or just songs that aren’t exactly age appropriate. Thankfully Roxi have this covered and in the settings you can switch to “parental controls” where anything with explicit content becomes unavailable. This now means that the kids can have more independence with it too to play together, and sing and dance without worry of anything dodgy coming their way!
What we weren’t so keen on
Cost – The initial cost is a lot for families on a budget so I guess you have to weigh up if its worth it. I’d say with Christmas approaching it would make for a great family gift.
Voice activation can get confused when there’s background noise – We loved the voice activation on the mic/controller, however occasionally when the kids were all chattering it couldn’t pick up what song we were requesting.
The kids are blown away with excitement by this new little addition to our home. They both love singing and dancing and have their go to faves (including Moana, Bon Jovi, Little Mix, The Trolls soundtrack and “can’t stop the feeling”, “Shake it off”, “Stitches”…. to name a few) and all of these were easily found on the jukebox which pleased them greatly!
Overall this new home music entertainment gets the thumbs up from us and we thing you would love it just as much.
Music really is better when shared together and we look forward to hours of singing, dancing and nights in with friends and family enjoying it together. So why not pop it on your Christmas list and enjoy hours of fun and family time, or just some favourite tunes to clean and work to, all at the touch of a button!
- Roxi Jukebox is available in 3 different colours and retails at £199.We were sent the Roxi Jukebox for the purpose of this review and all thoughts and (sorry for the very grainy) pictures are my own.
