A few people know I'm into vinyl jukeboxes, I've two and I've had them for over ten years. I've not bought any records for some time, but recently bought a few to "ring the changes," in one of them, although I've over thirty in a record rack, that are now "out of favour" The problem with a conventional jukebox, is that if you want to add a new record, you have to take one out to make space for it. Now throughout time, this was always the problem for jukebox operators, as it is now for me. You can't always rely on what you think is popular These things cost several thousands to buy or were expensive to rent. Their prime purpose was to make money for the bars and diners that had them. So there had to be a way of deciding which record to take out, that wasn't making them much money. Now you couldn't have a blanket policy, because different establishments might have a completely different clientele to the next one, so they may have had different choices of music. Tthe makers of jukeboxes pre 1980 devised a mechanical method of determining those records least played. This was done by a "popularity meter." This is the one in one of my jukeboxes, it's at the bottom of the photo. Every time a record is selected, a linkage rotates the meter and halts it as the record is removed from the carousel. A linkage you can see by the total use meter actuates a little brush which cleans the stylus before the tone arm sets it down (it does it on its way back too) and the linkage carries on past the right hand side of the turntable to an actuating lever on a bracket in the middle of the back of the meter. This advances one of the curved pins one notch through to the other side. The numbers on the rim of the meter, as the carousel and the meter are synchronised, match those of the title cards in the display. From this the operator could see the numbers of the least popular records and take one out to put in the new one. On this you can see No 100 is popular with me and No 197 not at all. Well not since I last pressed the reset button. On completion of this task, they would press the button in the middle of the meter. Then all the pins would spring back to the zero position. (edited as the photos didn't take). If you aren't bored with this by now, here's my YouTube video of the operation of a vinyl jukebox with a simplified explanation in the write up. Well some have been interested in the past as it's had nearly 10,000 hits, but has taken nine years to achieve them.
