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What Is The History Of The Jukebox?

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Coin operated music boxes and player pianos carved out a place for automatic pay per tune music in fairgrounds, amusement parks and other public places a few decades before the introduction of reliable coin operated phonographs. Some of these automatic musical instruments were extremely well built and have survived in the hands of collectors and museums. But commercially they could not compete with the jukebox in the long fun since they were limited to the instrument used in their construction and could not reproduce the human voice.

The immediate ancestor of the juke box is the coin slot phonograph. It was the first medium of sound recording encountered by the general public, before mass produced home audio equipment became common. Such machines began to be mass produced in 1889, using phonograph cylinders for records. The earliest machines only played a single record, usually about 2 minutes of music, but soon devices were developed that allowed customers to choose between multiple records.

In the early 1900s the cylinder gradually was superseded by the gramophone record. The term juke box came into use in the United States in the 1930s, derived from African-American slang jook meaning dance. The shellac 78 rpm record dominated jukeboxes until the Seeburg Corporation introduced an all 45 rpm vinyl record jukebox in 1950.

In the 1980s, the compact discs became the norm for modern jukeboxes. Towards the end of the 20th century several companies started introducing a completely digital jukebox that did not use CDs, but downloads the tunes from a secure signal sent over the Internet or through a separate proprietary transmission protocol over phone lines. In addition to automatically downloading a potentially larger selection than what is available on CDs in a single machine the digital jukeboxes also send back information on what is being played and where, opening up new commercial avenues.

Jukeboxes and their ancestors were a very profitable industry from the 1890s on. They were most popular from the 1940s through the mid 1960s, particularly during the 1950s. Today they are often associated with early rock and roll music, but were very popular in the swing music era as well.

Next Page: What Did The First Jukeboxes Look Like?

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