With vast libraries of songs and new levels of interactivity, jukeboxes are at the cutting-edge of technology.
There’s a certain romanticism surrounding the jukebox and its place within popular culture. It’s a mythology inspired by the thousands of songs and movies that make reference to the act of choosing a song for the whole room to hear. Unlike, say a pinball or an AWP, a jukebox can transform the atmosphere in a venue in an instant. It offers a collective, shared experience that other amusements rarely replicate. The jukebox industry is also one of the great coin-op success stories.
For the music industry, the advent of the internet has been something of a mixed blessing. Musicians and their fans are able to communicate and interact in entirely new ways thanks to Myspace, Twitter and the like, building their presence and extending their influence further than ever before. Yet it also created a new method of music distribution that the major record labels, quite frankly, failed to get a handle on. It seemed for a time that they were burying their heads in the sand while Apple re-shaped the industry and effectively killed off music in the physical form. Generally speaking, artists now earn far less from recorded music than they do from live performances, despite the fact that we are probably consuming more music than ever before. The way we do it, however, has profoundly changed.
Was the jukebox industry as slow to react? Not according Alex Kirby, sales manager at NSM Music, who suggested that manufacturers embraced digital music. His company was exploring the concept of downloading music via a multimedia source back in the late 80s and produced its first digital jukebox at the Earls Court show in 1999.
“We were actually a victim of being too advanced,” he told InterGame. “As a manufacturer we were every quick to respond. When we launched the machine, you could interact with it, network with it, receive data and make adjustments to it. The pub industry is an old school industry – or at least it was then – and it wasn’t ready for it. We were very fast to respond to the trend for internet-based machines and the way that technology was going, but unfortunately the industry wasn’t.”
This feature can be read in full in the September 2012 issue of InterGame magazine.
