juke

will this still be there to-morrow?
Jukeboxes' New Era - WSJ.com - Real Time to z0606 song ... just posted
in Brooklyn] bartenders at Boat and B61 sd th owners hd absentd thmslves fr th distributor-operator-owner ecosyst by buying CD jukeboxes. Boat's dominated by indier-than-thou contr by rglrs- pickg songs there like learng new lang
via rw: Net-enabled jukeboxes offer 100k+ songs (WSJ)

Jukeboxes' New Era Web Jukes Can Be All Things to All People,But Is That What You Want in a Barroom?June 5, 2006REAL TIME By JASON FRY 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 read 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 TouchTunes or Ecast. (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 an Ecast -- the bartender said an old vinyl jukebox was marooned in the basement. She called the Ecast 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 Ecast, 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.