Jukebox Blues

Jukeboxes played the tune for generations of American teenagers, who fed them coins to hear Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles. Those music machines, though, are going the way of the malt shops that housed so many of them. Industry experts say that by the end of the '80s the brightly lit boxes may be only a memory. The number of coin-operated players has already shrunk from more than 500,000 in 1976 to some 320,000.

Inflation and changing life-styles have combined to shatter the jukebox market. The price of a typical machine has risen from under $1,900 five years ago to nearly $3,000. Yet operators are afraid to raise the normal 25-c- price per play for fear of driving away business. Result: fewer jukeboxes are being installed.

At the same time, the traditional locations for the machines are vanishing. Malt shops and drugstore counters, where people used to put another nickel in so that the music would go round and round, have been hurt by fast-food franchises, which have little use for music. Says Leo Droste, executive vice president of the Amusement and Music Operators Association: "When I was in high school, you could walk into any drugstore and there would be counter machines where you could flip through the choices, look at the records, put in your money, and hear the music. You don't find those any more."

Among the few remaining jukebox havens are taverns, especially in the South, where the record players first got their name. Juke was a slang term for disorderly in the coastal area of Georgia and South Carolina. The name stuck to the music machines, although manufacturers prefer to call them coin-operated phonographs. However they are known, the once proud symbols of teen-age America may now be on their way to becoming just collectors' items and sources of nostalgia.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.