You know what it’s like: you’re sitting in the establishment of your choice, consuming your adult beverage and enjoying the music coming from the jukebox, when somebody comes along, shoves a few coins – or, these days, probably a debit card – into the machine and next thing you know you’re being subjected to that one song on the jukebox that everyone hates. If you or the establishments other like-minded patrons had known what was coming, you might have been able to gently inform the person making the selection that everyone else hates that song, and would he/she mind too terribly much to make a more publicly acceptable selection. But now, of course, it’s too late. The punk who picked the song paid his money and now you’ve just got to suffer through until the nightmare is over.

Well, there may come a day when all that will change. Google was recently awarded a patent that would allow you and your fellow patrons to stop the playback of the offending song. The patent covers “collaborative rejection of media for physical establishment.” With this technology in place, patrons at a bar, nightclub, or other establishment would be able to submit a cancellation request via their personal smartphones. The requests would be sent to the establishment’s media server. Software on the server would process the request and determine if they were valid, and if there were sufficient numbers of requests to initiate a cancellation.

In other words, if you and your fellow patrons decide that you’ve heard “Sweet Home Alabama” about seven too many times, then you open up an app on your phone (assuming it’s connected to local wifi) and request that the song be cancelled. If enough people send cancellation requests, then the media server kills the song, and you can go back to listening to more acceptable music.

The full patent can be read here.

What do you think? Would you like to be able to kill a song you didn’t want to hear in a bar or club? Let us know in the comments.