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Let's give the company the benefit of doubt for the moment. If a generation of CD buyers has indeed been left behind by the music streaming revolution due to its relative complexity, is Electric Jukebox the solution to the problem? Essentially, the Jukebox is an Android HDMI TV dongle, albeit one that focuses solely on music and shuns wider media playback and apps. It has its own custom UI, and its own custom remote. The latter is a strange thing indeed, a Wii-like wand that sort of looks a microphone mixed with a Fisher Price toy. It allows for voice searches—courtesy of Nuance's voice recognition tech—and its dearth of buttons means that, yes, you wave it around to navigate the UI.

Arguably, a set of arrow keys would have been a simpler and more sensible idea than motion controls for a technology-shy audience, particularly as even the best motion control systems (see Sony, Microsoft et al.) come undone at times. Still, the remote worked well when we tried it out.

The Jukebox's trump card, though, is how it's sold. When it launches in the UK and US this Christmas, it'll cost £179 ($229) and come pre-loaded with a 12-month pass granting you access to 30 million tracks, the same amount as Spotify and Apple Music. There's no subscription required, or credit card details, or passwords, or app downloads—it plugs into a TV, connects to a Wi-Fi network, and then it's up and running and ready to play some tunes. It even plays them at a reasonable bitrate: 320Kbps AAC+.

Of course, you can buy gift cards for the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, but it's easy to see the appeal of a picking up a box with everything that someone needs to get started streaming music—well, so long as that person owns a TV with a HDMI socket at least—without having to faff around with apps and other setups. According to the IFPI, 41 million people were subscribed to music streaming services back in 2014, up from eight million in 2010. With Apple Music now up and running that figure is likely to be a little higher, too.

"If you talk to Universal, there used to be around 200 million people that bought a CD every single month," Electric Jukebox CEO Rob Lewis told Ars. "Then there were hundreds of millions of others who bought quite a lot of CDs. After nine years, for a technological innovation to have got to the stage where you've got 40-ish million people subscribing, when you consider that almost everyone in the world loves music, to get to that amount after nine years is not the speed of adoption that you'd expect.

"The reason why people that used to buy a lot of CDs aren't [subscribing to music], it's that they don't like monthly subscriptions because they're worried they'll forget to cancel. Even if they do, the user experience is not as simple as using a CD."













The main problem is, the Electric Jukebox isn't that much easier to use than an Apple or Fire TV. You still need to plug it into the back of your TV and key in your Wi-Fi details. While the Jukebox's user interface is insanely simple—consisting of just search, curated content, and on-demand, complete with spinning CDs and nary a text-heavy table in sight—the same could be said for many other popular TV dongles, too. If, as Lewis explained, the Jukebox is supposed to be "like an appliance; like buying a Roberts Radio, or like buying a fridge freezer," then the fact that it still needs to be plugged into a TV to work—even if it that is the most common and accessible set of speakers in a household—is something of an odd choice.

"This is the first product of many," Lewis told Ars. "This user experience, this licensing model, is not just appropriate to [a wand-shaped remote]. It might also be appropriate to something that looks like a Roberts Radio that has its own screen. We're not a one product company."

While a Roberts Radio-like device would probably have been a better first product, it's hard not be taken with the Electric Jukebox. Bundling in a year's worth of unlimited streaming is a smart move, and makes it far more attractive as a present than a gift card. Even when the year is up, users will still have access to radio shows and curated content, which includes curators such as Sheryl Crow, Robbie Williams, Ayda Field, and Stephen Fry. They'll be able to purchase another year's subscription for £60 ($60) from a real-world shop, thus avoiding the need for entering any credit card details. £60 is pretty good when you consider that a mid-level Spotify subscription runs to £5 per month for 192Kbps streaming.

The jury’s out on whether an older audience really is avoiding streaming because it’s technically challenging, or it’s simply because they’re perfectly happy with listening to the radio and the CD collection they already have. Will the Electric Jukebox end up beneath a bunch of Christmas trees this winter, or will we see a whole bunch of them being flogged on QVC in the new year?

Electric Jukebox is available to pre-order from electricjukebox.com today. Those that pre-order before midnight October 21 will be able to purchase a unit for £149 in the UK and $199 in the US. All pricing includes a 12-month Music Pass.