RePlay ReView – Jukeboxes

Seeburg was resurrected once again in 1984 by former employees and became The Seeburg Phonograph Company.  They stripped the company to its bones – going from around 1,200 employees down to only 20 – in order to keep costs low.  But they were also sinking money into R&D, which allowed them to release the Seeburg SCD-1, also known as the Laser Music System, in 1986.  The Laser Music System was the first jukebox to use compact discs.

The SCD-1 featured a CD player from Sony, the Model CDK-006, that could hold up to 60 CDs, for a total catalog of 600 songs! 

Although the SCD-1 was successful enough to see a few generations of the machine – the SCD-1A and SCD-1B – unfortunately, thanks to supply line issues with the CD player, replacement parts were hard to come by.  As the machines gained a reputation for being impossible to repair, sales declined, and the company’s last jukebox release, the SCD-1F AKA The Seeburg Skyline, would come out in 1990 before the company went under once again.

There was a lot of competition in the audio/video world in the mid-80s and Rowe/AMI, one of the leading names in jukeboxes since the 1930s, was hedging their bets on what technology would come out on top by releasing the R-91 jukebox in January 1986.  The standard model held up to 100 45rpm records, for a total of 200 songs. 

However, the R-91 also came in a variation that could hold 80 45s (160 songs), as well as 6 compact discs (about 75 songs). 

But to really show they were thinking ahead, the R-91 was also available with an option for music videos.

According to a June 1986 article in The Chicago Tribune, jukebox sales for 1985 were around $960 million.  But industry experts predicted the marriage of music and music video could push that to $1 billion in 1986.  These new technologies – video jukeboxes – were set to take the world by storm.

Debuting in October 1986, the R-91 Video Music machine came with a 25” color television mounted on top and two Betamax players inside.  The machine held up to 80 45rpm records (160 songs) and the video tapes held 20 music videos (40 total).  Updated tapes would be provided by Rowe so you’d always have the hottest new tracks.  The owner of the machine could also add their own message to the TV, allowing them to create simple ads that would display whenever it wasn’t playing a video.  Thankfully, you didn’t have to be seated in front of the R-91 to be able to watch the video, as owners could connect it to another TV or bank of TVs so everyone in the bar/restaurant could see it.

The Chicago Tribune article mentions that Bally had installed the R-91 in its Aladdin’s Castle arcades.  

But Rowe wasn’t the only company looking to add video to the jukebox experience.  New York-based Videobox Networks president Justin Korn, said in the same Tribune article:

In 56 years, there never has been an evolutionary change.  This is the first evolutionary jump.  It is really going to affect the music industry…Video music is in the culture.  The problem is that it cannot get to the entire population through cable and broadcast.  If you consider that MTV and VH-1 are only available in 50 percent of the country, and that they are not suitable for most commercial applications, we are providing custom programming for those locations.  It is the next extension of the video music field.

To that end, the Videobox video jukebox debuted in 1985, first appearing at Tower Records in test markets like New York and Washington D.C.  Instead of using Betamax tapes like the R-91, though, the Videobox used 30 double-sided laserdiscs on two Pioneer laserdisc players, delivering up to 1,000 videos in genres like country, rock, pop, R&B, jazz, golden oldies, as well as live performances.

The machines were a bit on the pricey side – $5,495 – but the laserdisc technology offered a superior experience over video tapes.  Not only were the tapes slow to cue up videos, but the picture quality would degrade after repeated plays.  Tapes were also prone to break when they were constantly being rewound and fast-forwarded to specific time stamps.  In addition, the Videobox’s song selection menu was computer-generated and therefore updated automatically whenever new laserdiscs would arrive every month.  As an owner, you really just had to replace the discs and the machine would take care of the rest.

While the Rowe R-91 video jukebox came with an integrated television screen, the Videobox had to be hooked up to an existing TV or chain of TVs in order to watch videos.

The Tribune article mentions that Carson Pirie Scott, a Midwest department store brand that has since disappeared, had Videobox machines in 23 of its stores at the time.

According to court documents (never a good sign), Videobox stuck around until 1991 before going out of business.  

Another entry into the video jukebox field in 1986 was the Maxx II from New Jersey-based Entertainment Video, Inc.  EV’s first video jukebox, released in 1982, used video tape like the R-91.  

For the Maxx II, released in 1986, the machine featured a 27” TV screen and contained seven laserdiscs that held up to 15 music videos on each disc.  However, there was also an eighth disc that was dedicated to advertising.  

When a customer paid for a video, a short ad would run before the music video played, just like whenever you hit Play on a YouTube video today.  Whenever a video wasn’t being played, photos of the album covers would rotate to drum up interest in the artists available.

In order to report how many ads played, and thus provide additional income to the owner beyond the coin drop, the Maxx II was equipped with a 1200 baud modem that would periodically send music video selection and advertising data back to a central computer at EV headquarters.  While it was reporting to the central computer, it would also run self-diagnostic tests to anticipate any potential issues with the machine.    

According to the Tribune article, the Maxx II also featured a “programmable voice synthesizer” that could speak to users.  Oddly enough, the official flyer for the Maxx II that I found online does not mention this feature, so maybe it didn’t make it through the prototype phase or was deemed too expensive for production.

As of the Tribune article in June 1986, the president of EV, Patrick Gambuti, hoped to have 1,000 Maxx II machines in clubs and restaurants by the end of the year.   

This issue of RePlay Magazine also showcases two more video jukebox machines, the Audix 2000 and the Audix 3000. 

Unfortunately, these machines seem to have been lost to time, as the only information I could find was a single advertising flyer. 

And the flyer only mentions the Audix 1000, not the Audix 2000. 

According to the flyer, the Audix 3000 was a stand-alone video jukebox that featured a 25” color TV and its own sound system.  The machine held three, one-hour laser discs that could hold about 15 videos each, for a total of 45 videos. 

The laserdiscs came in a handful of genres, including Top 100 hits, Country & Western, Black Contemporary, and Oldies.  As with a lot of these video jukes, you could hook the 3000 up to your existing sound and video system for playback, too.  

The Audix 1000 appears to be essentially the lower-half of the 3000 model, but didn’t come with a television, so it had to be hooked up to your existing TV/audio system for video playback.

The real mystery is the Audix 2000 as seen in RePlay.  According to the blurb in RePlay, the 2000 “attaches itself to conventional audio jukeboxes”.

But perhaps the most important part of the blurb is the fact that the 2000 “Can be either wall mounted or table set”.  This makes it sound like the 2000 was the music video version of the remote selector jukeboxes that were seen in the booths of many diners starting in the 1940s.  

Remote selectors, also known as wallboxes, let customers drop in a coin and queue up their favorite song, all from the comfort of their table.  While many wallboxes were connected to the large, flashy jukebox that you could also walk over to and use, just as many were connected to a plain, black box that served the same purpose as the flashy jukebox, but was tucked in a back room of the diner somewhere that no customer ever saw.  Wallboxes were, essentially, early remote controls, running a larger machine via wireless signal.