Even more bang for digital bucks

WHILE many classic Seeburgs and Wurlitzers have been relegated to collectors’ living rooms or, worse, the junkyard, an entirely new generation of digital jukeboxes has quietly taken their place over the last seven years.

Companies such as San Francisco-based Ecast and Illinois-based Touch Tunes have been rushing to meet the demand for their Internet-based jukeboxes in bars around the country.

Instead of simply having 50 45-rpm singles, or even 100 CDs, a typical digital jukebox offers more than 150,000 songs searchable by typing the name of an artist, album or song directly onto a touch-screen keyboard.

“We’re basically like a large, public MP3 player,” says Ecast’s Micah Berek.

The company’s brand manager contends that barhopping twentysomethings deserve a better jukebox.

“The iPod generation demands choice on a much larger and faster scale,” Berek says, adding that the appeal of digital jukeboxes goes to the very heart of American post-adolescent nature.

“It’s very empowering to know that everyone is listening to ‘your’ song. Digital jukeboxes are especially appealing because the large catalog caters to just about anyone’s musical tastes.”

The broadband-enabled jukeboxes that Ecast manufactures (which cost $3,000 to $6,000) generate more revenue than typical jukeboxes and, with their lack of moving parts, have the added bonus of less maintenance -- a problem that has plagued many jukebox owners over the years.

Perhaps sensing that the days of the traditional CD jukebox are numbered, even Deutsche Wurlitzer is getting into the digital music jukebox game after years of success in the vinyl and CD jukebox markets.

The venerable German company, acquired by Gibson Guitar Corp. last month, recently released an iPod jukebox (the “One More Time”) and debuted a digital jukebox for the home at a consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas last year.

Wurlitzer’s soon-to-be-released jukebox for couch potatoes is expected to hit stores by Christmas, and the company is banking on direct-to-consumer sales to older music fans who may dislike the aesthetics of their computer as a stereo.

The sleek jukebox, equipped with Klipsch speakers, lets consumers rip CDs directly into the player and comes with the ability to directly download more than 750,000 songs, a touch-screen remote control allowing users to create playlists on the fly and more.

And Touch Tunes, which boasts nearly 20,000 jukeboxes installed in venues across the U.S., Mexico and Canada, is taking the digital jukebox even further -- unveiling a time-saving website, MyTouchTunes.com, that allows music fans free of charge, before they hit the bar, to create and save personal playlists that can subsequently be downloaded and used on any late-model Touch Tunes jukebox.