strenuously inoffensive

November 21, 2018 3:57 AM

Inside the booming business of background music
posted by fearfulsymmetry (36 comments total)

A lot of restaurants and shops I've been in take the easy way out -- they pipe SiriusXM satellite radio over their speakers. And why not? Their highly-curated stations let shop owners pick exactly what genre suits the clientele.

I get a kick out of it when I'm in a shop and a song that I really like starts playing, particularly when I'm not expecting it. XTC in Dress Barn. The Replacements in a department store. I mean, I feel _old_ when it happens -- how can something I used to be really into now be Muzak-caliber entertainment? -- but it's also a really nice and nostalgic feeling.

Now, if _I_ ran a shop, I'd thread that particular needle and play easy-listening covers of the Sex Pistols and Black Sabbath, just to see who I could catch singing along and then realizing just what they were hearing...
posted by delfin at 5:13 AM on November 21, 2018 [8 favorites]

so, a bit more clever than all the S. S. Kresge Background Music on archive.org, then?
posted by scruss at 5:20 AM on November 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

all the S. S. Kresge Background Music

Blue Light Serenade
posted by pracowity at 5:35 AM on November 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

I worked in a bookstore for several years. The non-holiday music was a fairly long set of tapes of classical music. I noticed that I knew the whole thing, but it wasn't too bad. The Christmas tape was shorter and after a while, you started humming the next song before it started. It was years before I got the song order out of my brain. When I had my own bookstore I tried to hire good people, and I asked them to bring in music. They all had better music collections than I did. People have to listen to it for 8 hours, it shouldn't be terrible.
posted by theora55 at 5:36 AM on November 21, 2018 [9 favorites]

Once a year or so, I and my husband splurge on one night at a luxury resort and spa near our city. It's a gorgeous, historic property that has been lovingly restored and meticulously maintained and costs actual limbs to stay at. The one and only thing that mars my experience there is the absolutely horrific middlebrow Kenny G-esque smooth jazz they pipe into every area except, mercifully, the spa. I cannot figure out why they do this. Every time I stay I fill out the customer comment form begging them to please please switch to chamber music or (more in keeping with the setting) traditional American folk in some sort of instrumental form, or, ideally just allow guests to enjoy the sounds of nature. I don't know if this is an Omni Hotels corporate policy or what but the situation would be vastly improved even by the fussy beanplating silliness in this article.

(Hat tip to the indoor bike park my son goes to, though, because I am always the oldest person there by about 2 decades but whoever is in charge of the music has excellent taste in classic rock.)
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:44 AM on November 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

I was in a coffee shop near my office a few weeks ago and was happy but slightly bemused that they were blasting early Black Sabbath and Zep and such. It was like being back in the record store/video arcade/head shop next to my highschool in 1979.
posted by octothorpe at 5:49 AM on November 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

Typically my best music-at-retail experiences have been at places where the employees just play whatever *they* want. But that's not replicable. Ptui.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:03 AM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

> I get a kick out of it when I'm in a shop and a song that I really like starts playing, particularly when I'm not expecting it.

That's truly one of life's little pleasures. I once heard Mule Skinner Blues by The Fendermen in a Shopper's Drug Mart first thing on a Sunday morning (of all places and times) and beyond simply loving that song, the incongruity of my surroundings and the music made my day.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:03 AM on November 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

The Guardian commission 4k words to report that people have playlists for different purposes?
posted by Damienmce at 6:03 AM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd be so happy if everyone would just stop playing background music. Everywhere. Stores, restaurants, whatever, just let me alone with my thoughts. Or whatever music is playing in my head. Or actually having a chance of hearing the waitpeople or cashiers. Just stop it already. There's enough noise in the world.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 6:04 AM on November 21, 2018 [20 favorites]

Hear hear!
posted by JanetLand at 6:27 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

The Replacements in a department store.

This has happened to me multiple times while grocery shopping in Kroger. My first reaction is always, "Hey! That's cool!" But then the reality of hearing the 'Mats in the grocery store kicks in, and I feel like an old fart.
posted by bwvol at 6:49 AM on November 21, 2018

I'll take the opposing view, at least in restauraunts. I do not want to hear people eating ever. The slavering, the mastication, the slurping, the lip smacking, the gurgles and glomps of food sliding down people's gullets, the belching, the farting, the shuffling of chairs, the clanking of dishes, of plates, of cutlery, all of it, it's horrible. Music masks that, and is about the only thing that makes eating in a place with other people bearable.

(Honey, if you don't have misophonia, I would not wish it on you, ever if you were a Trump voter.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:54 AM on November 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

About 10 years ago, I heard a Muzak version of "Karma Police" in a supermarket. I stopped abruptly in the coffee aisle to make sure I was hearing correctly, and, yep, the synthesized strings "soared" at the bit where otherwise Thom would have been singing, "For a minute there I lost myself". I was gobsmacked. Everyone else shopping around me seemed unfazed and were most likely not even paying attention.

It wasn't so much that I felt old as much as it was surprising that Radiohead had apparently given permission for their catalog to be used in this way, that is, assuming that they own the publishing rights to their music. I would have thought that they were very much against this sort of thing.
posted by droplet at 7:05 AM on November 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

The Guardian commission 4k words to report that people have playlists for different purposes?

It's a few thousand words on how the digitization of music led to an entire industry devoted to using quasi-scientific approaches to designing the music that plays in spaces without appearing to be so designed. It's especially interesting because it's another area where computerization has led to simulacras indistinguishable from realities.
posted by dis_integration at 7:08 AM on November 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

Droplet, are you sure that wasn't a Christopher O'Riley piece? He's kind of made "piano versions of Radiohead songs" his thing, but "instrumental versions of 90s shoegaze music" is sort of a musical niche unto itself right now (see also Westworld's sountrack).
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:09 AM on November 21, 2018

Picking our company's hold music (and writing the accompanying message) has been part of my job for years. I lived through the Muzak acquisition by Mood Media, so this article was particularly interesting to me.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 7:14 AM on November 21, 2018

I loathe background music. Working retail all through college left me with a deep hatred of all "pop" Christmas music, and buying a home meant that I spent far too much time trying to find all the various things I needed at Home Depot while a medley of disco songs blasted at a headache-inducing volume. I just want to grocery shop without ending up with Super Sounds of the '70s stuck in my head for the rest of the day. Honestly, silence is good!
posted by sarcasticah at 7:41 AM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Just an FYI that the new Target store redesign includes background music. Target! And it's not subtle either, it's in your face from the moment you walk into the store. It scrambles my nerves into a what-the-hell-was-I-coming-here-for state, which is probably the intended effect.

I prefer the old-school background music, like the Seeburg 1000 library. I imagine I'm sitting with my laptop at the lunch counter of a Woolworth's, circa 1966. It's surprisingly productive for me.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:15 AM on November 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

In my bookstore, we had a CD player and a library of blues, Latin jazz, classic rock, classical, etc. to choose from. We had a consensus rule, but one of my favorites was Muddy Waters Blue album by Paul Rodgers. I played it so often my asst. manager finally begged me to stop. In general, I dislike background music when it adds to the cacophony but sometimes it's fun.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:24 AM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

When I had my own bookstore I tried to hire good people, and I asked them to bring in music.

That's generally what we tried to do with music in the bookstore where I worked some decades ago. The boss brought in his Grover Washington Jr. and Bob James, which was the style at the time, and I could play my copies of Bowie Low and Heroes until they were all crackly (I remember a lot of sneaky back and forth with the volume control). For Christmas, though, I think we switched to Vince Guaraldi and other safe Christmas things because we were packed to the rafters with once-a-year book shoppers and we figured stuff like "Don't look at the carpet, I drew something awful on it" wouldn't encourage stressed out parents to stay and buy the latest James Herriot box set.
posted by pracowity at 9:12 AM on November 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

Just an FYI that the new Target store redesign includes background music. Target! And it's not subtle either, it's in your face from the moment you walk into the store. It scrambles my nerves into a what-the-hell-was-I-coming-here-for state, which is probably the intended effect.

Omg, I came in here to say this. I used to really like just wandering around Target, and it's largely because it was blessedly quiet! Now that they are piping music in, I just don't want to be there anymore. I'm sure it's based on marketing data about what makes most people buy more or whatever, but for me it causes me to not want to go there anymore.
posted by aka burlap at 9:46 AM on November 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

It is interesting to hear about people who have the job of creating curated playlists. But I would also Like to read a second article which looked at the growing sophistication of their competitor: the playlist algorithm. In the last 20 years or so we have gone from the primitive (“shufffle”) through to the moderately sophisticated (“genius”) and considerably beyond. I am listening to a Google Music playlist which is seeded on a particular song in my collection- and which is doing a pretty good job of chasing “what should go with what” - neither too jarring or too homogeneous. Google will not let me see that algorithm - and they won’t even tell me what will come next or what came before. But there is clearly some pretty clever stuff going on in terms acoustic and thematic grouping. For me, Google’s algorithm does not quite pass a musical Turing test where I could not tell the selection was made by a person rather than an expert - but it gets close and that is remarkable.
posted by rongorongo at 9:48 AM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was in Trader Joes and LA Woman was on the overhead. The place was crammed and it was delightful. I remember thinking, ah the boomers are out buying for Thanksgiving, and they know it. I love Trader Joes and California, piped in music pleasantly interrupts my tinnitus and cuts down on tuning in to side conversations. There is a whole lot of stuff "on the street" I don't want to parse. I like that there is careful curation, by able sound designers. It seems not as nefarious as I thought, less Manchurian Candidate. I also like the upstart DIY approach now available, with self curated channels.
posted by Oyéah at 10:00 AM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

One of the most perfect sandwiches I have had in my life was something called an Electric Wizard, eaten while the sludgy, reverb-heavy sounds of the band it was named after filled the shop it was made in. The whole experience really just came together into something more than the sum of its parts.

There are Yelp reviews of this place that take off stars for its tendency towards music involving heavy guitars. They are wrong. So wrong.
posted by egypturnash at 10:38 AM on November 21, 2018

Droplet, are you sure that wasn't a Christopher O'Riley piece?...
posted by soren_lorensen at 10:09 AM on November 21

It certainly could've been. Had no idea that was a thing and I'd never heard of him before now.
posted by droplet at 10:44 AM on November 21, 2018

I had the delightful experience once of listening to "I Wanna Be Sedated" while grocery shopping, with half the people I could see quietly singing along to themselves.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:28 AM on November 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

Still waiting to hear "Lost in the Supermarket" while grocery shopping. If this happens, it might be time to just go home and smoke a huge bowl.
posted by bwvol at 11:47 AM on November 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

Nothing will ever top hearing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" at Ikea at 9 am on a Saturday.
posted by asterix at 12:01 PM on November 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

Still waiting to hear "Lost in the Supermarket" while grocery shopping

This has actually happened to me...twice!
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:26 PM on November 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

They played Jane's Addiction "Been caught Stealing" at the very mainstream grocery store near the office the other day. Recognizing the song was a trip. Realizing that I'm now old enough to enjoy the music played in grocery stores- that was another matter.
posted by peppermind at 12:28 PM on November 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

Oh, I HATE the new music in Target. It's so loud!
posted by sarcasticah at 4:05 PM on November 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

One of our hangouts sometimes played compilations of KPM Stock/Library Music, which is hilarious if you're into this sorta thing.
posted by ovvl at 4:09 PM on November 21, 2018

Nothing will ever top hearing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" at Ikea at 9 am on a Saturday.

London, springtime, 1989 -- I heard Love Will Tear Us Apart on the muzak at a pharmacy. Being a traveler from afar, I thought, wow, Britain's just better at music than the rest of us. Because back in the Americas at the time, muzak was still resolutely muzak -- you may have recognized the tune but it was always a softened, neutered version of the real thing.

I don't know when it all changed but I do recall maybe ten years later standing in line at a grocery store in suburban Vancouver just starting to peak on acid (it's a long story) when there was Born to Run (the Springsteen original) on the muzak. The part toward the end when the band revs up into noise and then Bruce counts in the final verse "1-2-3-4" -- well, let's just say I thought the whole damned mall was about to explode. But it didn't.
posted by philip-random at 4:19 PM on November 21, 2018

Not sure which was more surreal, hearing the Chills' "Pink Frost" (featuring not the most-uplifting of lyrics) at Chipotle, or Billy Idol's "White Wedding" coming out of the speakers at Wells Fargo.

Either way, I think we've officially entered whatever you'd call the post-post-post-modern era.
posted by gtrwolf at 10:26 PM on November 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Comic shops seems to have decent music, well at least the ones I frequent... I was in London's Forbidden Planet a few weeks ago and it had an eclectic mix of mainly punk, new wave and classic rock. Now I wonder if it's was curated to appeal to a customer like myself.

Back in the day I remember hearing 'Destination Unknown' for the first time when I was buying trainers.

Also that one time a song (Geri Halliweel's 'Look at Me') was so bad it actually forced me out of the Virgin Megastore I was in.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:24 AM on November 22, 2018