Last year, when Mike Stuto opened the bar HiFi in New York's East Village, he couldn't imagine settling for a jukebox that played the standard hundred albums. So he built one that plays 1,700. Now he boasts that EL-DJ, the PC-powered MP3-playing machine he developed with partner Timothy Roven, is "the best jukebox on the planet." And he knows his music: For more than a decade he ran Brownie's, the late, great indie rock dive that was in the same space as HiFi.
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James Westman EL-DJ, the MP3 jukebox that's packing them in.
Every component in EL-DJ is off-the-shelf: The arcade-style cabinet holds a 900-MHz Pentium III system that's networked to a pair of 160-Gbyte Snap Servers in the basement. But the interface that allows users to scroll from ABBA to the Zombies is custom-made, and Stuto and Roven have formed their own company, Empire Digital Music Systems, to market it to bars, clubs, and the odd music geek with a couple thousand CDs weighing down his shelves. Reactions from bar patrons have been encouraging, and members of hip New York bands like Radio 4 and the Liars have been in to DJ. "It was pretty consuming," remembers Liars guitarist Aaron Hemphill. "I spent 45 minutes digging through all of those albums."
A buck gets you three tunes – the jukebox standard – and Stuto pays a share to ASCAP and BMI. Meanwhile, patrons often bring in paper to scribble down the names of songs they like, he says. "I'm sure I help sell records."
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