The jukebox got its start earlier than you might think, but it truly became iconic when rock ‘n’ roll took over in the 1950s

Steven Melendez

In 1889, a San Francisco tavern called the Palais Royale debuted a hot new attraction: a modified Edison phonograph that, when a customer inserted a nickel, played music from a single wax cylinder. Electrical sound amplification was still years away, so customers had to insert stethoscope-like tubes into their ears to hear anything, ideally toweling down the tubes afterward to remove earwax ahead of the next listener. 

Despite this unwieldy setup, the machine reportedly brought in more than $1,000 (some $34,000 today) in less than six months, and coin-operated music machines soon proliferated in bars, at drugstores and even in new listening parlors across the country. Alas, poor sound quality meant selections couldn’t be soft or subtle, so popular offerings included such earsplitting numbers as John Philip Sousa marches and the novelty whistler John Yorke AtLee performing popular ditties of the day. By the early 1900s, the machines struggled to compete against player pianos and other automated instruments that could entertain whole venues with higher-quality audio—and without requiring patrons to stick foreign objects into their delicate ear canals. 

But record players continued to improve in quality and volume, and pay-to-play phonographs made a huge comeback in the 1920s, paving the way for the jukebox era. In 1927, the Automatic
Musical Instrument Company unveiled the first amplified, multi-record coin phonograph. Jukeboxes—they took on this nickname in the 1930s in reference to African American “juke joints” of the South—introduced the world to music on demand, for far less than buying a record (and on better equipment than people had at home). The boxes also reshaped the recording industry, as labels began releasing music specifically designed for post-Prohibition barrooms and cafés. Danceable big-band numbers and tunes like the “Beer Barrel Polka” were early hits, and the irrepressible popularity of jukeboxes soon rocketed artists like swing impresario Glenn Miller to national fame, creating an audience for loud, catchy, rollicking tunes, often played on newly electrified instruments, shaping what would become country, R & B and rock ’n’ roll. 

Jukebox operators came to account for a majority of record sales, as they frequently changed out selections to keep customers dropping nickels. Using meters within the machines, operators could track which tunes were most popular at which locations, and they programmed boxes accordingly, offering a mix of national hits and more regionally specific selections. The latter included many tunes by Black and working-class musicians, in folk genres such as country and blues that tended to get scant airplay on the radio of the day but soon found appreciative listeners on jukeboxes. 

By the early 1940s, about 500,000 jukeboxes dotted the country, sometimes inspiring too much of a ruckus: Newspapers frequently reported on bar fights over music selections and complaints about noise. Snootier critics, meanwhile, voiced more petulant grievances: “The contrivance is everywhere and is always booming its inanities,” one Los Angeles Times writer lamented in 1941.

But jukeboxes had a chance to prove their patriotic bona fides during World War II, when they provided vital entertainment on military bases and at troops’ canteens, sometimes on machines donated by public-spirited American operators—not a single nickel required. “Not even the cacophony of war can dull the magic power of Wurlitzer Automatic Phonograph music,” boasted a 1944 ad. At the same time, a number of jukebox manufacturers, including Wurlitzer, retooled factories for weapons production. 

After the war, stylish and streamlined jukebox cabinets in diners let teenagers listen to rock ’n’ roll at volumes generally impossible (or at least inadvisable) to achieve at home. Jukeboxes became indelibly associated with 1950s youth culture, the songs selected as easily as ordering a diner burger or milkshake. Jukebox operators now furnished teenage canteens, modeled after the military rest spots where the boxes had helped entertain the youth of the previous decade. The format of hit-after-hit music queues also helped inspire teen-friendly Top 40 radio, replacing older formats that defaulted to playing several songs in a row by a single artist.

Over the next couple of decades, jukeboxes would see their numbers dwindle as fans turned to other sources of entertainment, including increasingly high-fidelity home stereos, television and the transistor radio, where Top 40 countdowns now introduced listeners to hits. “Sound of jukebox is fading melody,” reported one Associated Press headline in 1982, estimating jukebox numbers in the United States had fallen by more than half since the 1950s, while video games became the main draw in coin-operated entertainment. Yet decades later, jukeboxes—many now digital—continue to ring out across the U.S. And the idea that public establishments should offer a curated selection of recorded music, whether individual patrons like it or not, has become nearly ubiquitous. We’re living, and listening, in a world these machines created.

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Making a Racket

While America thronged to the jukebox, mobsters often controlled the action

By Teddy Brokaw

Though the mob had been involved with music since at least the start of the Jazz Age, the jukebox, with its all-cash business model and fungible record-keeping, showed clear potential for tax evasion and money-​laundering operations and quickly caught the attention of organized crime. By the 1940s, Mafiosi, foremost among them Meyer Lansky, had pioneered the typical racket: Buy up all the jukeboxes in an area and lease them to businesses in exchange for 50 percent or more of the take. But the scheme’s true brilliance was its scope: The mob owned not only the jukeboxes, but also, often, the record companies supplying the discs and the contracts of the artists cutting the records. It was a masterpiece of vertical integration, and it worked gangbusters. By the mid-1950s, one enterprising gangster—Chicago Outfit member Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, pictured below—controlled 100,000 of America’s half-million jukeboxes and was raking in several million dollars a year. 

With made men at the helm, the jukebox industry relied on hits—of both kinds. Mobsters could make or break an artist’s career through their control over what made it into the machines and thus climbed the charts. And beatings, bombings and even murders were just “one of the liabilities of the business,” as a Wurlitzer sales executive testified to a Senate investigative committee in 1959. Jukebox owners who didn’t play nice risked seeing their machines destroyed, while rival jukebox distributors who refused to cut the mob in on their operations were whacked on more than one occasion.  

The jukebox may be a relic of a bygone era, but the mob’s influence in jukeboxes remains. As recently as 2018, a reputed mobster was gunned down on orders from his own son, then seeking to take over his father’s New York racket. The victim’s funeral procession was led by a car carrying—what else?—a jukebox made of flowers.