Where are your hidden customers?
Who plays your jukebox? Our experience built up over years of speaking to customers and research carried out via our online connected jukeboxes, shows that the typical jukebox candidate is probably male and given that chart music makes up for over 80 per cent of plays, probably under 30. Often the same demographic will use the pool table in a pub if there is one. However, there is also a large group of older jukebox customers given the popularity of bands such as AC/DC, the Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
This was upheld in our charts for last year, which we published this month and the story was picked up on the website Coin-op Community (www.coin-opcommunity.co.uk). The most played tracks of last year were Blurred Lines, by Robin Thicke (featuring TI and Pharell) Avicii’s Wake Me up and Get Lucky by Daft Punk but on the most played classic tracks 70s band AC/DC featured twice and was the fourth most-played artist of the year.
This prompted a retired operator from Taunton in Somerset to comment, “The spend demographic is bought into quite sharp focus with these charts. The accent on pure pop suggests an audience that has spare spending power, so maybe in their late teens and twenties – the AC/DC thing suggests an older group who are out of the debt mountain…But the mortgaged in the middle seems absent.”
While the mortgaged middle may be at home because of the high cost of babysitters and the low cost of supermarket booze, there are a number of other customers from all walks of life who will be in the pub and who may not be using the jukebox.
That’s why we created the soundjack app. In the US, where a similar concept has been up and running for some time, there has been a significant lift in revenue for sites whose jukeboxes or background music systems accept paid for music selections via smart phones. We believe there will be a 30 per cent increase in revenue once our app is up and running over here.
The reason why – because it will draw out those hidden customers. Those women who don’t want to have to push past a queue of blokes lined up by the pool table in order to make their music choice, for example. That family who are waiting for their lunch order and allow their six-year-old to put Olly Murs on the jukebox using dad’s phone. Perhaps even one of those mortgaged middles who wants to hear Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car but doesn’t really want the whole pub to know that their music taste got stuck in the 80s!
Our soundjack app will be launched at the EAG show in London next week and will be available to download via Apple’s iTunes this month.
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