Startup ideas can come from every which way, but they usually come from direct experiences: Glove.ly started making their gloves because they were cold, Uber was created because its founders couldn’t find a ride. Jukebox.io founder Sairam Chilappagari based his company’s product off his personal experiences as well, but he drew from two seemingly disparate cultures to do so: that of South Asian coffe shops and startup offices. These places don’t have much in common with each other, but there’s one constant Chilappagari couldn’t help but notice: people wanted to control the music. The plan is for Jukebox.io to allow its app users to temporarily control the music of whatever space they’re in, from bar to bowling alley, a miniature jukebox in every pocket allowing for the perfect entrance music to any party.
In Southern Asia, jukeboxes play a large role in determining where people eat. In India, for example, one can find places named specifically after their jukeboxes. When you purchase a drink, you get a code which you can enter into the physical jukebox. This can cost fifteen rupees, or about twenty cents. Intrigued, Chilappagari started asking people in these coffee shops if they would be interested in a download business, where for a five additional rupees they could own the song through a legal download. They laughed in his face, saying they could steal the song for free. It wasn’t song ownership they were after, it was a social experience. Later on, Chilappagari was working at a start-up and noticed that a constant battle was being waged over the company’s open Pandora station. Everyone would try to fiddle with it to add an artist and preference of their choosing.
Western music, has a long history of being social. Chilappagari has a better understanding of this than most, and has dedicated a sizable section of Jukebox.io’s blog to the history of the jukebox as a financial and social medium in America. These pieces focus on the amount of diversity people could find in jukeboxes, noting that tough “financial times didn’t bode well for retailers, but jukeboxes continued to draw change from the pockets of rich and poor alike. Few people could afford phonographs, which also required the investment of new records in order to hear new music. 78’s, mind you, could hold only about twenty minutes of music. Radios provided strictly ‘sophisticated’ mainstream music; access to anything else meant buying an album or—you guessed it—getting yourself to a juke joint”.
Most startups have enough challenges getting one app off the ground, but Jukebox.io is focusing on two separate ones: one for the customer and one for the venue. “We have an app for the venue site”, says Chilappagari, “ where they can set all their preferences. Genre, artist, and connecting the actual music so it gets played through the speaker system. As for the user side, all you see is Jukebox, and you select it, and then you select the music, and then you play it in the venue you are in. Once you are in this ecosystem, the next step is having the venue interact with the patrons in their ecosystem. So we are actually finishing the loop, from the venue playing the music, people participating in the music, and then you reach out to the people who participate in the venue. So we’re completing the whole circle in terms of venue music”.
2014 was full of promise and hardship for the music industry. Streaming music faced growing pains and the physical release faced a rare bump upwards, both in the form of Taylor Swift. One thing that never stopped was music as social currency. In 2015, Jukebox.io plans to trade in that currency for another, more physical one: money.
Photographs by Lauren Kallen.