July 27, 2005

Tracks that might offend

Last Monday, I concocted a plan, together with Some Guy I Met In The Pub, that would make us both incredibly rich. However we're both far too lazy to implement it, so I'm going to go ahead and tell you all in the hope that someone else gets rich off it instead. Just remember you saw it here first, OK?

Modern pub jukeboxes, it seems, offer the capability to download tracks from a vast selection (2 million according to Leisure Link's sales bumf), downloaded over now-ubiquitous broadband. This is something of a step up from a classic pub jukebox which might offer 50 or 100 albums, totalling maybe a couple of thousand tracks at best. Of course, not all 2 million tracks are stored on the machine at once, but those which are stored on the machine can be played for half the price of those needing to be downloaded, and those which are downloaded frequently tend to "evict" the less frequently played tracks from the disc. So far, so good, although clc points out the risk this system creates, that someone might choose tracks that might offend the delicate ears of other pub-goers.

But why stop there? Why make people pissed up on a night out stagger up to the jukebox and try remember the name of the song they suddenly really fancy hearing? OK, for some people that's the whole fun of jukeboxes, but wouldn't it be cool if you could identify some tracks in advance, before you go out, and have the machine recognise you and play them? So, my scheme is to issue RFID tags of some kind to people containing a unique ID, along with login credentials for a website. Then you just top up your account on the site with credit, and let it know the tracks you want to hear; perhaps it could hook into an audioscrobbler/last.fm type system, and "learn" your musical preferences, although there would need to be a facility to override your choices for a given night, and pick tunes to suit particular occasions. Then when you get to the pub or bar, you just walk up to the machine, wave your ID token at some sensor, and away it goes, taking credit from your account for every track from your selection it plays (up to some limit you can set, perhaps.)

And why stop there? How about if the RFID tags operated over a slightly longer range, so the machine would know who participating in the scheme was in the pub at any given moment. When not playing paid-for tracks, most of these machines play a "random" selection of tracks, so why not base this selection on the preferences of those present, weighted fairly between everyone with an ID token? Given the machines are also capable of communicating over the Internet, it would be possible to set up a "no repeats" system, too, whereby every person who buys into the scheme is guaranteed (or as close as possible) to not hear the same track twice in, say, any 3 hour period — and here's the clever part — even if they move between several different venues.

OK, so in the cold light of sobriety it doesn't seem quite as groundbreaking or at all likely to succeed, but it seemed a really good idea at the time.

(An aside we didn't think of at the time: perhaps the scheme could let users specify songs they truly hate, and endeavour to avoid playing said tracks in the presence of those users...)

Posted by James at 02:47 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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