Category: BLOG

Digital Jukeboxes Ruined the Dive Bar…I may have told this one before but I can’t find it.

In the 90s, during the dot-com era, I had the opportunity to propose my idea for a digital jukebox at the company that I worked at. Back then, jukeboxes played a significant role in bars, as they often determined whether the bar was a hit or a miss. Each jukebox had a unique selection of songs, providing insight into the bar’s atmosphere and the people who frequented it. Unfortunately, my idea did not come to fruition, as our company, like many others at that time, faced financial difficulties.

My concept involved implementing a digital jukebox system in bars. We would store the music library in a server room and allow bar owners to pick the jukebox’s song collection. The bar owners could choose the songs they wanted, which would then be loaded on the jukebox. Furthermore, they would have the flexibility to add or remove songs as they pleased but it would be a limited number of songs similar to a traditional jukebox.

This approach would have preserved the unique identity of each bar, with different establishments boasting different songs/themes. However, with the advent of high-speed internet and unlimited storage and streaming services, digital jukeboxes now have access to virtually every song or album ever recorded. Consequently, this has undermined the charm of the traditional dive bar jukebox experience. Nowadays, you’re just as likely to encounter a mix of Hank Williams Jr. and Justin Bieber to Spice Girls songs in what was once a seedy dive bar where you might have stumbled upon classic tracks by Hank Williams Sr. and Patsy Cline to Social Distortion.

To me the first thing I used to do when going into the bar is check out the jukebox as it told a story about the bar and the people in it.

Back in the 80s and 90s, finding new music was a labor of love. We didn’t have the internet and fancy AI to make recommendations. Don’t get me wrong—I like technology and have still discovered great new music that I never heard of before. However, back then, it was a serious commitment to find new music.

Not only did I work in record stores; I lived in them. I would dig through the normal LP/CD bins, searching for anything that caught my eye. I even sifted through the boxes of music under the bins, looking for that one special song or band that no one had heard of yet. I’d gather a big stack of music, move to the listening station, and start listening—30-45 seconds of each song intro, then moving to the middle of the song to listen some more. I bought the ones that caught my attention, whether for personal listening, playing in clubs, or on the radio.

When I was in Bakersfield hosting X-Factor radio and in SLO hosting The Other Side, the labels sent so much music that it took days to sift through them all to decide what to play on my show. It was a huge commitment, but I made sure to find at least four new songs each week for my Sunday night radio show and at least one new song per week to play in the clubs I DJ’d at so it wouldn’t be the same thing every week.

On top of that, I scoured through magazines and zines, joined multiple BBS before the internet, and later, webrings and band websites in the early days of the internet. Finding new music was a lot of work, but it was fun work.

Back in my day, society wasn’t ready for this type of music. You couldn’t just type in a band name on Spotify with your little Doc Martens and dyed crazy-colored hair and have AI offer up recommendations. You had to go out in public. Walking down the street with blue hair, Docs, and a trench coat meant you might get into a fight with angry rednecks, the local college baseball team, the high school football team, or even the cops. I once took a fastball of a full beer can to the face from a future pro college baseball player. But I digress; this is about the search for music, not the lifestyle of the time.

Living in record stores was a fantastic time in life, and finding that one song or artist that no one had heard of yet was a special feeling. It was a lot of work, but it was so rewarding.