12/23/2023 0 Comments Touch tunes![]() The decisions that determine which songs we can hear on their jukeboxes are not made based on the quality of the music itself. This is how TouchTunes threatens our freedom of choice. To get a sense of how small TouchTunes’ selection is, consider that hundreds of new albums are released every week, according to Jim Pinfold, a buyer with Bull Moose Music in Portland - and that’s not counting imports or CDs distributed locally by aspiring musicians. The 200,000 songs TouchTunes makes readily available on its system constitute a tiny fraction of the music available on CD. The proprietor, or jukebox vender, simply buys the album and puts it in the machine. The reality is exactly the opposite.Īssuming standard licensing practices are followed, the owner of a CD jukebox can, in theory, make any compact disc ever produced available to his or her customers. ![]() By comparison, a CD jukebox with 100 discs puts only about 1,200 songs at your fingertips, and the selection tends to be changed much less often.īut the impression that TouchTunes gives the public exponentially more choice in music than its CD counterpart is illusory. TouchTunes has licensing rights to a library of about 2 million tunes, approximately 200,000 of which are available on its system at any given time. “In general, we try to make our music available in a competitive way that works for us, our customers and our end users.”įlimsy though it may be, the justification for charging music lovers twice what they were accustomed to spending before is the convenience of being able to access more songs. “I’d have to defer pricing policy to some of the sales people,” said Marc Selsen, TouchTunes’ vice president of corporate marketing. So why the extra charge to hear a track already on the system? The cost of the electricity necessary to download a song is negligible. TouchTunes’ machines are always connected to the Internet. CD jukes typically give you seven credits for $2, making TouchTunes more than twice as expensive. Listeners of even moderately discerning taste will often spend $2 for three songs. The TouchTunes jukes around here give you three credits for $1 - vending companies have some leeway to set the cost per credit - so if you want to hear a second song that requires downloading, you’ll have to feed the box another buck. (In advertising, this sort of manipulation of the consumer would be called “bait and switch.” Among patrons interviewed for this article, the most common term for this practice was “bullshit.”) If you want a different track, you’ll have to spend an extra credit to temporarily download it to the machine. Instead of a listing of every track, the screen offers only one or (occasionally) two songs from the album - invariably the tune you’ve heard 1,000 times before. But as soon as you select one, it becomes clear something is amiss. TouchTunes’ screen displays upwards of 2,000. CD jukes are typically limited to holding 100 albums. Portland is no exception: from Amigos to Yankee Lanes, TouchTunes is the only digital jukebox to be found.Īt first glance, TouchTunes appears to offer a far more extensive choice of music than was ever available before. There are a few other companies that make digital jukes, but TouchTunes has the New England market “pretty much locked up,” said Mike Lano, owner of Lanco Vendors in South Portland. Over 700 million songs are played on TouchTunes annually, making it the second-largest provider of digital music in the world, behind Apple’s iTunes system. TouchTunes is the dominant company in the so-called “out-of-home” entertainment market, with over 40,000 jukeboxes in its North American network. ![]() Just as digital formats and devices like MP3s and iPods are usurping compact discs as the preferred means to listen to music on headphones and at home, digital jukeboxes are replacing CD jukes in bars, restaurants, billiard halls and bowling alleys. But vigilant as we are against threats to our personal liberty, we keep letting little things that undermine our freedom of choice slip by, especially if it’s convenient to do so.Ĭase in point: the TouchTunes digital jukebox. We celebrate it, sing about it, and are prepared to defend it even if we have to annihilate life on earth in the process. We Americans are funny about our freedom. Why the digital jukebox revolution is revolting Inside the Portland punk-rock club Geno's.
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