Last night I went out to dinner with my father, and the bar had one of those new-fangled jukeboxes with a touchscreen display that allows you to browse through a vast library of artists & songs. Someone had left 7 credits on the machine, so I waded through all the crappy rap & modern dance (jeez, kids these days…) until I got to some REAL music: AC/DC. (First one on the list, natch!)
Based on what happened next, I’m positive that the bar owner must have inserted those credits intentionally, to lure gullible fools like me…
After AC/DC finished playing, I decided to insert a few spare quarters for another rockin’ playlist. Insert 25c – nada. Another 25c – nada. Another 25c…and that’s when I bothered to look at the display telling me the price: "$1.00 = 2 credits. $5.00 = 12 credits."
What the BLOODY FUCK???
Oh, it gets worse. Most songs, esp. the good ones, cost TWO credits to play. You also have the option of spending THREE credits to play your song immediately, bumping your selection to the head of any queue that’s formed before you. Yes, technically you could spent $1.00 per song and never hear them played because some other jerkass spent $1.50/song just to grief you. $1.50 per song!!! I could download them for cheaper than that!
So fuck you, modern jukebox. Fuck you for destroying a bygone era when songs only cost a quarter (in my time) or even less. Fuck you, and fuck that Beyonce CD you kept trying to sell me every ten seconds. And fuck you for taking advantage of drunken idiots (or non-drunk ones, like me) who don’t expect you to ass-rape them!
It’s a real rock in the box rant! You know what you need to do now. That’s right, wait until the owners Golden Retriever is left alone and fire that puppy up. I bet you have just scratched the surface in that bar though. If you look closely, you will see that their drinks is way more expensive than you can have at home.
There’s an ice cream shop around here that deliberately tries to recreate the 50s look and it has a working jukebox. Yes, the pound-you-in-the-ass charges were there, but we all played one song for old-times sake. Hey, we’re all in our early twenties, we weren’t there for the real thing!
Where have you been? Fifty cents for a song sounds about right to me. That’s about equal to a quarter in the early 80s, adjusted for inflation. You pay extra for songs not on the normal playlist. There’s plenty of standard party songs to choose from, but if you want to search their online database of music (at least I think it’s online–it may not be), it’s an extra credit (fifty cents). Sounds perfectly fair to me. At least these days I could walk up to a jukebox and, say, if I’m really in the mood for a Pixies or Smashing Pumpkins tune, I don’t have to worry about whether that particular jukebox establishment has it in their collection. If I’m willing to put down a buck, it’s there for the playing.
Also, you probably don’t want to step into an arcade if you’re expecting everything to still cost a quarter a play.
No, no, you want the jukebox to be expensive. If songs are too cheap, you’ll never get to hear the songs you want because there’ll be a long queue of crappy songs that other people have put in first.
The Arrows did “I Love Rock and Roll” in 1975 (Joan Jett, of course, did it better).
For them, it was putting another dime in the jukebox baby. A dime in 1975 is 41 cents today. The modern jukebox bulk package pricing of 12 for $5.00 fits perfectly with inflation (again using the The Arrows as our starting point).
However, you are ranting about something that used to cost a quarter costing a dollar today. Feel free to enter the year when you could spend a quarter for playing a single and see just how much of a shaft you have gotten:
I saw a Chuck Berry special the other day. He was reminiscing about what his records first sold for (59 cents) and the penny he got from each sale. Not it’s a buck just to hear a song?
Man are you (OP) going to be pissed when the RIAA puts DNA scanners in those things and you have to pay based on how many people will be listening to the song.
