[Jukebox-list] Are jukeboxes playing CDs now obsolete?

[David Breneman]

Forwarded from the 78 Collector's Mailing list...

--- Steve Ramm <steveramm78l at hotmail.com> wrote: 
> Interesting article from the Wall St. Journal. First 78s go away,
> then 45s. 
> Now Cds?
>  
> June 5, 2006
>  
> REAL TIME
> By JASON FRY
>  
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> WRITE TO REAL TIME
> 
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> in a 
> future column. If you want to share your thoughts but don't want
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> 
> ABOUT THE COLUMN
> 
> 
> Jason Fry writes Real Time every Monday. Jason is an editor at the
> Online 
> Journal, and also co-writes The Daily Fix6 sports column. Write to
> him at 
> realtime at wsj.com7.
> 
> Jukeboxes' New Era
> 
> Web Jukes Can Be All Things to All People,
> But Is That What You Want in a Barroom?
> June 5, 2006
> Last week I left the office one afternoon on an important mission:
> I had to 
> visit a whole bunch of bars in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. My
> interest 
> wasn't beer (alas), but music: I'd just read1 about Web-enabled
> jukeboxes, 
> and wanted to see if they were making inroads in New York City.
> 
> They are. Of the 14 jukeboxes I encountered, half were digital, and
> 
> bartenders and owners agreed that CD jukeboxes' days were coming to
> an end. 
> I walked away from my survey thinking that Web jukeboxes were cool,
> but 
> fretting that they were another example of how the digital age has
> empowered 
> individualism but risks eroding a sense of community in doing so.
> 
> Let's get a few things straight: I don't wax nostalgic for the days
> of 
> Wurlitzers that played 45s. I don't find CDs sonically lifeless. I
> don't 
> grumble about MP3s being lossy. And I'm always excited to walk up
> to a bar 
> jukebox with a $5 in my hand.
> 
> Any jukebox is a challenge, and programming one is an art that's
> part making 
> a mix tape and part DJing. Beyond the obvious pitfalls -- no one in
> this bar 
> really needs to hear "Sweet Caroline," "You Shook Me All Night
> Long" or "New 
> York, New York" again -- you have to understand the bar's vibe to
> keep from 
> detonating a musical land mine. (Just because an old-school Italian
> bar has 
> "Welcome to the Jungle" on its jukebox doesn't mean a little G 'N R
> is 
> what's called for at this particular moment.) Can you impress your 
> music-geek pals with the right balance of undeservedly obscure
> songs, 
> guaranteed-to-please tracks and stylistic left turns?
> 
> Jukeboxes don't have to be perfect, either: Any barfly with a buck
> can 
> program a great jukebox, but it can be more fun to program a
> middling or bad 
> one. Can you find the gems in a jukebox full of classic-rock
> warhorses? Give 
> an frat-boy jukebox an indie tinge? Keep your rock-minded friends 
> entertained in a country bar? And can you do it without arousing
> the ire of 
> the regular clientele? Depending on the tone of voice used, few
> questions 
> can be as heartening or wounding as "Did you pick this?"
> 
> The first three places I visited in lower Manhattan were Irish bars
> (two 
> Blarney Stones and the John Street Bar and Grill), and all had
> digital 
> jukeboxes from TouchTunes2 or Ecast3. (According to the Associated
> Press, 
> Montreal-based TouchTunes, founded in 1993, supplies songs for some
> 17,000 
> jukeboxes in the U.S.; San Francisco-based Ecast, founded in 1999,
> powers 
> some 7,500.) Either way, the basics are the same: You flip through
> an 
> alphabetical list of artists, pick an album cover, then are offered
> the 
> most-popular songs from that album. If you don't find what you want
> that 
> way, you can drill deeper and find other songs by the artist, or
> summon a 
> virtual keyboard and type in a specific title. While some big
> artists are 
> missing, as are many indie labels, we're still talking about
> hundreds of 
> thousands of songs.
> 
> Only a few thousand of those songs are actually resident on the
> digital 
> jukebox's hard drive -- if you're drilling deeper, you're searching
> through 
> songs housed on a server somewhere else, and it costs more to
> download and 
> play them. Depending on which variety of jukebox you encounter, you
> can see 
> the most-played songs, look at new choices that have been
> spotlighted or pay 
> a premium to skip your songs to the front of that jukebox's line.
> 
> Web jukeboxes will definitely make life easier for bar owners: New
> albums 
> and hit songs are pushed to them remotely, with no need to crack
> the jukebox 
> open and swap CDs. And I quickly noted how easy it was to find and
> play 
> songs I wouldn't find on many CD jukeboxes. My test cases were
> obscure but 
> not impossible: albums by the Replacements and "Before They Make Me
> Run," 
> Keith Richards' wobbly turn at the mike from the Rolling Stones'
> "Some 
> Girls." The Web jukeboxes passed both tests, which was comforting, 
> particularly while enduring "If You Leave Me Now" by Chicago.
> 
> I didn't find a CD jukebox until my fourth watering hole, the
> Nassau Bar 
> (playing some unidentifiable metal when I arrived), and it
> contained a 
> smorgasbord of metal, dance music, and mixes, including a willfully
> 
> schizophrenic one that had Danzig and the Baha Men sharing space.
> (All in 
> all, an interesting challenge to program.) Had the bikini-clad
> bartenders 
> heard of Web jukeboxes? Absolutely -- in fact, they'd
> unsuccessfully lobbied 
> the owner to get one.
> 
> A few blocks uptown, the rough-and-tumble Raccoon Lodge ("Total
> Eclipse of 
> the Heart" was playing, presumably ironically) had made the jump to
> a 
> TouchTunes -- the bartender said an old vinyl jukebox was marooned
> in the 
> basement. (Author's note: Originally, I mistakenly said this
> jukebox was an 
> Ecast.) She called the TouchTunes the "best jukebox in the world,"
> saying it 
> let her have her own music play. The Raccoon Lodge's late-afternoon
> 
> customers also endorsed the TouchTunes, applauding its selection
> and the 
> ability to jump the line ahead of "some retard playing a bunch of
> country 
> music".
> 
> In Brooklyn, things were different. My first stop was the affably
> bare-bones 
> Hank's Saloon, whose CD jukebox is superb and even has a mix of
> Replacements 
> songs. (And you get a generous 18 plays for $5.) From there, it was
> on to 
> the Brooklyn Inn, site of a willfully eclectic CD juke (with the
> Stones' 
> "Some Girls") and then Boat and B61.
> 
> In those last two bars, I saw evidence of a backlash. The
> bartenders at Boat 
> and B61 said the owners had absented themselves from the 
> distributor-operator-owner ecosystem by buying their CD jukeboxes,
> and the 
> music reflected it. Boat's jukebox is dominated by indier-than-thou
> mixes 
> contributed by regulars, and even the few traditional albums there
> have had 
> their album art replaced by photos and doodles. Picking songs there
> is like 
> learning a new language. B61's jukebox (my favorite) is surprising
> without 
> being showoffy, offering up Jim Carroll, Ice Cube, the Jam and an
> obscure 
> Replacements B-side ("If Only You Were Lonely") in rapid
> succession.
> 
> It's impossible to imagine Boat without its idiosyncratic CD
> jukebox, but 
> elsewhere, digital is clearly on the march: Ecast CEO John Taylor
> says his 
> company's Web jukeboxes typically earn two or three times as much a
> month as 
> CD models. (For many bar owners, the debate will end right there.)
> The 
> Brooklyn Inn's bartender said the staff had been rallying against a
> Web 
> jukebox; when asked if Hank's Saloon had considered one, the
> bartender said, 
> "Not yet." Surveying his mostly meat-and-potatoes CD jukebox,
> Dakota 
> Roadhouse's owner said that "in 10 years it'll be like looking at
> one with 
> 45s."
> 
> At the Raccoon Lodge, one customer volunteered that a bar a few
> blocks had 
> the same jukebox. Which, to me, is the core of the argument: With
> Ecast or 
> TouchTunes, "the same jukebox" means more than the same model -- it
> means an 
> interface to the same universal set of songs. Sure, that set is a
> couple of 
> orders of magnitude bigger, but it's the restriction of musical
> choices is 
> something that can tell you a lot about a bar's character. With Web
> 
> jukeboxes that premise is endangered, because every bar essentially
> has the 
> same jukebox.
> 
> But not so fast. Ecast's Mr. Taylor notes that the bar owner and/or
> jukebox 
> operator can filter, channel and otherwise tailor the company's Web
> 
> jukeboxes in any number of ways, making an Ecast box heavily tilted
> toward 
> blues or any other genre desired. Along those lines, it's worth
> noting that 
> the 10 most-played songs were quite different at the Raccoon Lodge
> and the 
> Blarney Stone, both of which sported Ecast machines. CD jukeboxes
> expanded 
> music choices from 100 vinyl sides to more than 1,000 songs,
> without 
> apparently impacting a sense of community. There are lots of
> reasons people 
> go to bars besides jukeboxes, and some of those reasons are pretty
> resistant 
> to homogenization: You'd never mistake the Brooklyn Inn for the
> Nassau Bar 
> even if both had the same uncustomized Web jukebox.
> 
> But to my mind, the danger is still out there: I have my doubts
> that many 
> bar owners will bother customizing their jukeboxes. And if every
> jukebox 
> offers essentially infinite choices, every jukebox can be turned
> into your 
> own jukebox, made to play your favorite songs. This is the kind of
> rugged, 
> techno-powered individualism we've come to expect from our digital
> age, and 
> it's not surprising to find it pushing into bars. But does it
> belong there? 
> A good bar is a community, or at least aspires to be one, and I
> think a 
> jukebox that's all things to all people runs counter to that.
> 
> It was nice to see I could perform some prestidigitation and hear
> the 
> Replacements in the Blarney Stone. But it was far more significant
> to find 
> them waiting for me in B61. The former told me I could bend a bar's
> music to 
> my will, or at least try. The latter told me I might belong.
> 


David Breneman         david_breneman at yahoo.com

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