A Nickel Bought the Song and Cast a Vote
The company shipped 56,246 units of one model in two years. By 1974 the production line had gone quiet, and the most valuable thing the machine made had never been sold at all.
Three Minutes for a Nickel
The record dropped onto the turntable with a soft slap, and for a second there was only hiss.
Then the needle found the groove.
You had stood in front of the machine a long time before that. The glass tubes along its sides glowed orange and green, and colored bubbles climbed through them without hurrying.
The song titles sat behind a small window, typed on little cards. You read every one of them twice.
The coin went in with a click you could feel in your fingertips. You pressed a letter and a number and walked back to the booth, pretending not to watch the arm move.
Nobody in the diner looked up. Somebody at the counter started tapping a spoon.
It was a Wurlitzer jukebox, and it was the loudest thing in the room.
7 presidents. One date on the calendar
Seven times since 1933, the gold market has come within days of breaking.
Roosevelt. Johnson. Nixon. Carter. Bush. Obama. Trump.
Every one was in office when it happened.
And every break landed on the same kind of date. The day paper holders can demand the actual metal.
Roosevelt repriced gold overnight. Nixon shut the gold window. In 2020 they invented a new contract on the fly.
The next of those dates is September 30th.
I've found the company I want to own before it arrives.
The Meter Inside the Cabinet
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company began in Cincinnati in 1856, selling imported instruments. It later moved its manufacturing to North Tonawanda, New York, and built its first jukebox in the early 1930s.
The company sold the machines. It did not run them.
A route operator bought each cabinet and placed it in a diner or a tavern at no cost to the owner. The owner and the operator split the coins, often down the middle.
Every week the operator came back with a sack of new records. He also opened the cabinet and read a row of counters, one for each selection.
That was the part nobody in the booth ever saw.
Each nickel bought a song. It also recorded a vote. Songs with low counts came out, and songs with high counts stayed and got ordered again for the next stop on the route.
The machine looked like a way to play music. It was a way to measure it.
The Room Where Hits Were Counted
In the late 1930s, network radio mostly broadcast live orchestras, and a particular record was hard to hear when you wanted it. The end of Prohibition in 1933 had filled the country with taverns that needed music and could not afford a band.
The cabinet solved both problems. The tavern got a band for nothing, the operator got a share of every coin, and the record companies got a customer that bought in bulk, week after week.
By one widely repeated estimate, about three quarters of the records made in America in the mid-1940s went into these machines.
In 1940, customers fed roughly five million nickels a day into about 250,000 of them.
The peak came just after the war. The Model 1015, the one with the bubbles, sold to distributors for $750, about twice the price of the prewar models. In 1946 and 1947 the company shipped 56,246 of them, when a typical run for a new model was about 10,000.
A song could climb out of a single town. Operators watched a record catch on in one neighborhood's counters and carried it down the rest of the route.
The Song Followed the Teenager Home
The cabinet's advantage was never the sound. It was that the room was the only place to choose the song.
After the war, the choice moved. Top 40 radio played the same records all day, at no charge, over and over. Cheap portable radios put that station in a pocket, and better home phonographs let a teenager own the single and play it forty times in a bedroom.
The interstates pulled traffic away from the roadhouses where many of the machines stood.
The counters kept counting. They were no longer the only count that mattered.
Once a hit could be heard anywhere, the machine in the corner stopped deciding what a hit was. It became a place to hear one again.
Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye
Jukeboxes had once brought in about 80 percent of the company's revenue. By 1973 they brought in about 15 percent.
In 1974, the company shut down its jukebox line in North Tonawanda. According to one account, the last machines came off the line while a polka called "Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye" played.
The name kept appearing on cabinets built in Germany.
The piano and organ business went to the Baldwin Piano Company in 1988. The bubbling cabinets moved to basements, collectors' garages and diners built to look older than they were.
The Tally Outlived the Machine
The idea inside the cabinet did better than the cabinet.
Every music service now counts plays, song by song and town by town. Each one promotes and pays by that count.
A song still earns its place the way it did on the route. Somebody chooses it again.
People paid for the song. The industry was paying for the count.
