Rosen Music Studio, Koreatown

Rosen Music Studio
3488 W. 8th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90005

Telephone: 213.387.0469



















(Photo from Yelp.)

I love that this place is called Rosen Music Studio, like it's some sort of professional place to record music. Yeah, not so much.

It's a good ol' karaoke place. Not a karaoke bar, mind you, for those are a disaster. Strangers singing? I don't need to hear that. My friends singing? I need to hear that and record video of that with which to blackmail them at a later date!

Korean (and Japanese) karaoke is for small groups. American karaoke bars are literally bars with a single karaoke machine, which is not so much fun unless you like to wait for four hours to sing one song.

In Koreatown, there are a few karaoke places that do the job well. Rosen is one of them. They have 33 rooms, I think (give or take a few), and the rooms vary in size depending on how many people have come along with the ride.

After the meat-athon on Saturday night, we decided to go sing a little. Spur of the moment decisions can be bad in Koreatown, especially on a Saturday night, because every place you could possibly want to go is booked. Restaurants, bars, karaoke...

We called and hooray! A room was available. The bad economy's good for something, after all.

We were only a party of six, so we got shown into one of the smaller rooms. Smaller doesn't mean that it's not as good; I actually prefer the smaller rooms because it seems like the sound is better. (The photo above is of one of the largest rooms- note the tambourines, a Korean karaoke necessity.)

Two bottles of lemon soju, one bottle of peach soju, one bottle of melon soju, and four hours later, we emerged happy and flushed and hoarse.

There are fancier karaoke places in Koreatown (Orchid, for example), but Rosen is a solid choice for good times and good soju. (They didn't have yogurt soju on Saturday, which made me sad. Yogurt soju sounds disgusting but is really, really good!)

Price isn't too bad. We stayed between 3 and 4 hours and had four bottles of soju and the bill came out to just under $200 for 6 people (not including tip).