Jukebox Crystal Ball: Autumn ‘07
What does the future hold for the venerable jukebox? How will this much-loved American icon be shaped in the future? Clearly, pay-per-play public performance of recorded music still has a vital role to play in our industry and in American culture. And it also seems clear that the predicted technology shift has finally arrived. Digital […]
Operators: True American Independents
I compared the cashbox economics of CD jukeboxes versus digital in July’s post, and on the surface the numbers seem to quite convincingly favor the digital machine. But a fairly strong case for the continued viability of CD jukes also emerged from those same calculations. So what do operators think? After all, these are the […]
CD’s Silver Anniversary
The following post eventually appeared in the November 2007 issue of Playmeter magazine, a trade journal for the coin-operated amusement industry. Happy 25th birthday to the venerable compact disc! 25 years ago today, on 17 August 1982, the first CDs were pressed in a Philips plant in Hanover, Germany. By most accounts, a recording of […]
Cashbox Economics: CD Jukes vs Digital
It’s no secret that operators are struggling to make money on their routes these days. The oft-asked question is, “Where will the next Pac Man come from?” The reality is that music is still profitable, and digital downloading jukeboxes seem to be the closest thing to “the next Pac Man” that the industry has currently. […]
The Long Tail
You may be familiar with “The Long Tail.” It’s an economic observation made by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine and popularized in a Wired article and a book of the same name. The theory can be applied to the jukebox route in a couple of ways. Anderson observes that in the new digital economy, as […]