On latest players, choice is unlimited
The menu at Flash's, a saloon on Boston's Stuart Street, offers many choices. The jukebox offers even more.
This jukebox, a wall-mounted unit with a touch-screen similar to an automated teller machine's, has a hard drive on which 3,000 songs can be stored. It also has a broadband Internet connection to a music database. All told, a paying customer has about 150,000 song choices.
At the bottom of the screen, an alphabet helps customers select songs on the hard drive. Pick a letter and what's displayed are images of album covers for artists whose names begin with that letter. Select ''R" to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers or the Rolling Stones. Touch the album cover, and the screen displays songs on that album. To select a song, touch the title.
To download a song from the Internet database, a customer touches a box on the screen to display a keyboard. A customer can then search by artist, song, or album title, or genre, by touching keyboard letters. (Not an easy feat for someone who has achieved too much incandescence at the bar.)
At Flash's, a customer purchases credits from the jukebox to play songs -- one credit is 50 cents, five credits are $2, and 14 credits are $5. This jukebox accepts cash and credit cards.
It costs one credit to play a song on the hard drive and two credits to download a song from the Internet. A ''make-mine-first feature" costs four credits; using this feature bumps a song to the head of the line. (This works only for songs on the hard drive.)
Jennifer Cogswell, a photographer and a video producer, is a fan of ''make-mine-first." She described herself as ''an old fogey" who doesn't care much for today's music. At Flash's recently, she played songs by Van Morrison and Elton John.
Referring to the ''make-mine-first" feature, she said, ''If I'm tortured by young people's music I can override it."
Cogswell nearly always plays songs from the hard drive; downloading a song from the Internet is too time-consuming, she said.
When she goes to play the jukebox, Cogswell said, her friends sometimes tell her, ''We came here to talk to you, so don't be up there all night."
Songs on a jukebox's hard-drive tend to reflect a bar's local color, said Robbie Vann-Adibe, chief executive of Ecast Inc., the private San Francisco company that provides the Internet access and the database of licensed music. Much of the music that customers download is newly released.
At Flash's, downloaded songs account for 40 percent of the music played, compared with the 35 percent average for Ecast's nationwide network of roughly 3,000 jukeboxes.
Like Cogswell, Scott Rose said downloading a song can be a chore. ''You have to do a lot of legwork," said Rose, 40, a banker.
An Ecast spokesman said people become more adept over time at downloading and that younger folks, who grew up with computers, do it with ease.
But if Rose doesn't like searching the database, he enjoys listening to a jukebox with a wide range of choices. He's also fond of J.J. Foley's, another Boston bar.
There, ''You have a cross-section of businessmen, bike messengers, and Irish nationals," he said. ''You can hear some interesting music."
Chris Reidy can be reached at reidy@globe.com. 