GnuMusiq/jukebox

I'm completely stunned that the internet seems to have killed the jukebox; it should have done the opposite.

Traditional jukeboxes were large, expensive, limited in selection, and required a significant amount of work in order to change out each record. The selection tended, therefore, to change very infrequently. On top of that, the fidelity tended to be low (due primarily to lack of maintenance on the needles used).

A modern, digital jukebox would not only be quite inexpensive to produce (even using off-the-shelf hardware and software) but could, via internet connection, have a selection that was essentially limited only by licensing restrictions and by filtering imposed by the venue (for example, a family restaurant might want to allow only songs that had been vetted for language). It could be searchable, as small as a few inches a side (basically an LCD monitor with a dedicated CPU attached), and could play music videos as well as music.

Remote units at each table (like this, only digital) could be connected to the main player wirelessly, and could show what was currently playing (something the old mechanical units never could do).

On top of that, artists wishing to gain more exposure might offer their songs for free play on jukeboxes. Venues could choose to randomly play one of these songs every so often, if nobody was putting money into the machine. (Some latter-day CD jukeboxes have been known to randomly play tracks during lulls in traffic, either for promotional purposes or as a way of drawing attention to the jukebox and hopefully inspiring paid spins.) Unlike traditional jukeboxes, however, a digital jukebox could display a history of all recent plays -- so that someone who heard a song they liked could find it elsewhere.

Digital jukeboxes could even offer to sell songs on the spot, to anyone with a USB stick. (If this caught on, they might even dispense USB sticks or CD-Rs of purchased music, but that would obviously involve some mechanical R&D.)

Notes

I had plans for a digital jukebox as early as 1997, back when part of the plan had to include downloading music overnight via modem. This would have been part of the Red House Store, which was originally conceived as an online store for local/indy music in late 1995. The selection would have been much more limited, due partly to bandwidth issues (downloading several megabytes could take several hours over dial-up) and partly to storage limitations (affordable hard drives had only recently crossed the gigabyte line), but still far less limited than any mechanical jukebox.

It remains a mystery to me that the music industry hasn't bothered to update the jukebox concept -- but I have yet to see anything resembling a non-mechanical jukebox in any venue. It may be that it would be of benefit primarily to indy artists and labels, who lack the resources individually to develop and promote something like this.