The Downfall of Bar Music

This is a jukebox. Stylish design - nice. Touch screen - informative. Coin slot - old but useful. Dollar slot - a sign of inflationary times. A credit card reader... wait, what?! Oh dear god!

I took this picture as a "sign of the times" piece, but then it slowly sunk in... this is a cautionary tale about technology momentum. This is where natural trends in technology are applied to new fields and not truly scrutinized in the new system. A credit-card reader is a natural progression for convenience with rising jukebox prices (the companies can't get their tunes off Napster anymore I guess) and decreasing numbers of customers carrying cash. But what does this mean in practice? That drunk people will have near limitless easy buying power to line up the entire soundtrack to their high school years in the 80's, holding the whole bar subject for hours. "OMG, Up Where We Belong - I love that song!"

Now I've never seen this machine in operation, so perhaps it is much better than I thought. Perhaps they brought economic lessons learned at EBay and utilized them. Perhaps you can bid on time slots. Did some biker-jacket-wielding baseball-cap-head just use his Hooters credit card to buy 15 back to back Billy Yates songs? Well, let the bidding begin.

Maybe you offer a max of $3 for the next song slot so you can interject a sanity relieving track from Malevolent Creation. Unless hat-boy ups his 75 cent bid to best your 80 cents, he will be treated to "Supremacy Through Annihilation" instead of "Daddy Had A Cardiac and Mama's Got A Cadillac". I can see this kind of bidding leading to some fights and massive profit for the jukebox machine. But how violent could it get compared to subjecting drunk people to the entire discography of Michael Bolton?

P.S. Luv ya, Billy Yates... and BTW, Malevolent Creation is a hard-core death metal band which is part of a sub-genre known as "Florida death metal". People, I am not making this shit up. The started in Buffalo though. Thank you again, Wikipedia.

Florida death metal is more rigid and percussive than the Swedish variant, more precise, refined and traditional.