Make 'Em Dance and Sing
Small Change Turns Big Profits With Latest Jukebox and Coin-Op

    Not sure what genre of music your demographic has been attuned to? No need to worry.
    The digital jukebox alternative gives each customer the option of playing almost any song imaginable.

The Digital Revolution
    While beer may arguably still be the most downloaded commodity in bars, music isn’t far behind. TouchTunes Music Corp. recently announced the installation of its 20,000th broadband jukebox and also reached an unprecedented billionth song mark. Rapper Paul Wall’s “Sittin’ Sidewayz” was played at Clancy’s Irish Pub in downtown Indianapolis earlier this year, beating iTunes to that record only weeks before they claimed their billionth download.
    “Single-unit locations are becoming a lot more sophisticated, McAllister says. “They get one opportunity to get a customer in and keep them there as long as they can, and the common denominator in all of these locations is music.”
    The growing presence of mp3 players and satellite radio makes the utility of providing crowds with a bit of musical variety a mandatory step in drawing a diverse customer base. An upcoming addition to the company, MyTouchTunes lets customers pick the music they want from their PCs, create playlists and retrieve the songs from any broadband TouchTunes jukebox that has the forthcoming Gen III operating system installed.
    “We compete at the bar level with background music systems, karaoke, live entertainment,” McAllister says.

All Eyes Facing The Wall
    Betson Enterprises’ product line ranges from video games and pinball to tabletop games and other club favorites. Betson’s hot item right now is a wall-mounted, flexible-interface touch-screen device from Merit Industries known as MoD BoX. “It’s basically like a remote wall unit to select music and play games,” says Dave Lerner, sales representative for Betson.
    “This is the vehicle that’s going to bring healthier collections to locations,” says Lerner. “(Patrons can) bring up any artist, any song that you can imagine ... in excess of 400,000 (songs). It’s so encompassing as far as content, and, of course, there are filters on these boxes, so if there’s a certain genre of music a location doesn’t want, it’s able to be filtered.”

Bringing In Winners
    Patrons aren’t only going out to clubs to tinker with the latest jukebox, it seems.
“Instant redemption is the hottest thing in the industry at the moment,” Lerner says. “Games have become more sophisticated in the level of play and prizes.”
    Many games give players the option of winning prizes; instant redemption games up the ante by offering rewards more luxurious than stuffed animals. “You reach a certain point and you have the ability to win a minor prize or continue to play for a major prize which can be anything from an iPod to a cell phone — the only limitation really is the imagination of the operator. Guys are doing things like concert tickets (and) sport events tickets as major prizes,” Lerner says, “and you’re starting to see some of the more progressive guys putting those (games) into a tavern location. That’s really the hook in these games — fill them with anything a tavern patron would desire.”                   NCB