Jukeboxy vs. Mood Media: Pros, Cons, Costs & More

Jukeboxy and Mood Media are two business-focused music streaming companies that provide very similar services, with key differences for your businesses.

Both services allow you to legally play music in your business, and both offer the ability to personalize playlists to your business needs.

Business-Focused Media Streaming Companies

If you have a business and you’re streaming music from Spotify or some other streaming platform or even just playing music off a radio, you need to be paying monthly fees to the appropriate performing rights organizations (PROs). Without proper licensing, you would be liable for copyright infringement since you don’t have the rights to play music in a public and business setting.

Background business music and audio advertising are vital parts of building your brand and your franchise, but it can be very complicated to navigate the field. Buying rights to individual songs to play in your business is an unwieldy process that is incredibly time-consuming and difficult to navigate.

This is where business-focused music streaming companies, like Jukeboxy and Mood Media, come in. For a fee, they will help you make the best music decisions for your business.

What Is Jukeboxy?

Jukeboxy is intended for people like project managers who are comfortable using their mobile devices and trying out new apps. You can create an hourly, daily, or even a weekly schedule of playlists.

You can also record in-store public announcements to cycle in at regular intervals. For example, if you have an upcoming promotional event, you can upload unlimited audio messages to your account, and you can program how often you want the messages to be broadcast in your storefront.

Jukeboxy, which is enabled to work with devices that can run Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, comes with a two-week free trial. You do not even need a credit card to sign up for the trial, and you are not obligated to purchase the service at the completion of the trial period. The Jukeboxy Business plan begins at $29.99 per month.

Setting up the app is quite easy. If you have multiple franchises in different locations, you only need one account. Your managers at your other stores can download the app on their devices and use it without any extra charge.

Jukeboxy provides its own hardware for the best sound quality, but you are free to use your own devices as well.

The Jukeboxy App Network

There are three apps that are part of the Jukeboxy network: the music streaming app, the weekly scheduling app, and the in-store messaging app. The three are designed to integrate with one another without confusing you with too many unnecessary options.

The scheduling app, for example, lets you curate playlists based on the nature of your business brand and even according to your operating hours. The manager app will let you see and control which music is currently being played in your store even if you are off site.

Jukeboxy has access to nearly 25 million songs across a variety of genres, primarily due to contracts with PROs and even independent labels that are not on a major label.

Jukeboxy’s apps are used in spas, hotels, coffee shops, retail and grocery stores, and restaurants.

If there’s a negative to Jukeboxy, it’s that it offers you so many options that you could find yourself curating playlists more than paying attention to the other needs of your business. Even this can be rectified, as the apps allow for a degree of automation.

Mood Media

Mood Media takes the work of monitoring your company’s media off your hands by offering fully ad-free music, secured through licensing from a number of major performing rights organizations. It does this by providing special licenses to a company like Pandora, which can be used in any number of business and commercial establishments.

There are limitations on where you can use your Mood Media account to play music through Pandora. For example, in businesses that charge admissions where entertainment or physical activity is conducted — such as health club classes, aerobics classes, bowling alleys, skating rinks, or choreographed organized dancing in dance studios, discos, or ballrooms — the service will not be available.

But if your store is not based on using licensed music and collecting an admission fee for guests to consume the music as part of the nature of your business, there should be no issues with using Mood Media through a Pandora business account.

Setting Up & Using Mood Media

Through that Pandora business app (which can run across multiple mobile and PC/Apple devices), you can click a simple thumbs-up or thumb-down icon to tell the app if you want a song to stay on your store’s playlist or ban it forever.

As with other music streaming services, you can schedule music and public announcement messages based on your store’s hours, what time of day it is, and if you have any special events or promotions running.

One benefit of Mood Media through Pandora is that there are no timeouts for inactivity. Once you create your playlist and announcements, you can leave it running for hours at a time. As long as you pay your subscription, there are no limitations on listening hours.

As with Jukeboxy and other business-oriented streaming services, Mood Media offers its own hardware device for optimal sound quality in your stores. You are also free to use your own devices, so you don’t have to pay for the Mood Media device.

Something that sets Pandora and Mood Media apart from other similar services is that Pandora was one of the first online streaming programs. For people who used (or still use) a personal Pandora account, switching over to Pandora for Business is not a complicated process at all.

If you are interested in using Mood Media through Pandora for Business, you get a short free trial, after which you must pay $26.95 per month to use the service. The optional player requires a $99 one-time charge, and it has no service or maintenance fees.

References

World's First Alexa Enabled Business Music Streaming Service, Jukeboxy Music for Business. (June 2019). Business Insider.

A Review of Jukeboxy, the App Based Music-for-Business Service. (October 2018). Reliable Counter Blog.