Behold the Jukebox Revival

America’s Millennial generation receives a lot of criticism from the media, their older relatives, and even themselves. But one positive development that can be traced directly to Millennial influence is the revival of the vinyl record. Millennials, seeking the most authentic sounds possible, have fallen in love with what to many of them must have seemed an antiquated technology at first.

Now, feeding off of the demand for vinyl sound, is a revival in demand for vinyl playing jukeboxes. I own a German-made duplicate of the 1948 Wurlitzer Jukebox (plays 45s), and I play records (LPs) on the same Dynaco/AR Music system I bought back in the late 60s. It’s interesting to see this technology becoming popular once again as consumers demand better sound than CDs and MP3s.

Allyson McCabe reports on NPR‘s All Things Considered:

In Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, Perry Rosen walks over to a 1967 Rock-Ola Imperial jukebox, punches in a letter and a number and smiles as the song “Spooky” by Dennis Yost and the Classics IV starts spinning.

Jukeboxes have fascinated Rosen since childhood. But unlike other kids whose eyes were drawn to the bubbles rising up through the colorful tubes, Rosen says he was always looking through the cracks in the front door or the dome glass, trying to understand how these machines worked.

Rosen’s father was an auto parts salesman. One day he saw a broken jukebox at a local gas station and offered the owner $75 for it, thinking it would make a nice gift for his mechanically inclined son. Over the next week, Rosen, then 16, took the device completely apart and then put it back together again in perfect working order. He explains that the jukebox we’re listening to is that very machine.