TouchTunes: Bar Jukebox

TouchTunes puts the jukebox in your pocket. In bars, restaurants and other venues that use TouchTunes machines, the app connects to the one in the room and lets you queue songs from your seat, without crossing a crowded floor to stand at a machine while somebody else waits behind you. The music library is large, spanning current hits and older material, and you browse it on your own screen with proper search rather than through a wall-mounted interface designed in a hurry. Finding jukeboxes near you is built in, which is a small feature with an unexpected use: it tells you which venues nearby have one, and by extension which are the sort of place where the music is not a fixed playlist chosen by the management. There is a social dimension to any jukebox that an app cannot remove and does not try to. What you queue is heard by everybody in the room, and the choice you make will either lift the evening or be quietly resented by strangers for the next four minutes. That responsibility is the entire charm of the format. Payment happens in the app, and credits can be bought in advance so choosing a song takes seconds when the moment arrives.