You call any customer service and wait. And in waiting you listen to some music, sometimes beautiful and sometimes not. And almost always, given the waiting times, unbearable.
But that background music, that sound destined to keep us company in an impersonal and generic way, generates profits. And many, since the global background music market has earned more than one and a half billion dollars last year, will grow on average by 5.1% between this year and 2031, when the global market will exceed the figure of two billion and 300 million dollars. Not bad for what we are used to perceive as music that they simply mark the passage of time before someone (increasingly rarely, given the explosion of automated telephone assistance services) answers us.
In reality, the market is not only made up of telephone waiting music: background music accompanies us in supermarkets, offices, in shops, bars, hotels and restaurants, serves to improve the environment we enter, to make it friendlier and less impersonal, but also to increase productivity and strengthen the relationship with customers. A relationship that, with the growth of online shopping, has in many ways been weakening and pushing who has an activity open to the public to improve the experience of the physical visit, offering a kind of entertainment alongside products and services.
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Not only on the phone, but also in bars, shops and offices
The driving sector is that of bars and restaurants, which use background music to characterize the place, to give it a precise and defined atmosphere, to make sure customers stay longer and, consequently, they spend more and are encouraged to return. Equally important is the use of sports facilities, gyms, wellness centers, for which background music is (especially in the latter case) essential. And technology, in this world of consumer-related ambient music, has become increasingly important. The systems through which the background music is diffused are basically two: the audio-video one and the web app one.
Il first case is the dominant one, sports facilities and those in the world of hospitality obviously play the lion’s share, and each of them needs technological devices that allow the diffusion of music in several environments and, in some cases, the diffusion of different music in different rooms of the same structure. The according to instead it focuses more on the simplicity of musical selections and integration with simple audio systems, especially for smaller structures. But who is able to choose the best music for each facility? Here a good number of companies operating in the sector come into play, with consultants able to advise the owners of the structures, with specialized programmers who mix musical knowledge with those of marketing and psychological ones: there are so many on the scenefrom international ones come Mood Media o Touch Tunesto what Italians such as Newton & Associati, able to offer support to anyone who wants to enrich the commercial or professional offer with music that creates engagement. Or just keep company.
In short: it is a bargain, since according to an English study we spend on average 25 days of our life every year in telephone waiting and much, much more time in supermarkets, shops, offices, gyms and hotels.
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From the 1920s to today, a brief history of the Muzak
But it is also a form of music that has a name: it is called muzak, which is both a term that defines a very light, gentle music, without particular reasons of interest, made to fill the void during an elevator trip inside a a skyscraper, either a trademark duly registered by the Muzak Corporation, after US Major George Squier filed for a patent to transmit music over wires in 1922. The name was created mixing the word music with the Kodak brand, to emphasize that the invention would bring music to the masses just as Kodak made photography become cheap and popular. The Muzak Corporation (later absorbed by Mood) was born thinking precisely of the sound reinforcement of work and consumer environments, or simply to fill a void, “so as not to fall into the black hole that is one step away from us”, as Colapesce ingeniously sings. and Dimartino in Very light music. With the advent of the 1960s, the muzak had fallen into disuse, indeed the term had taken on a strong negative connotation, and the company had been forced to close its doors in 2009, but in recent years, having forgotten the name, the background music has regained strength, especially with the growth of telephone services , which have become increasingly important and widespread. Here too there is a patent, that of the Telephone Hold Program System, created by Alfred Levy in 1966 to “reassure the caller in case the wait becomes unduly long”.
Evidently, not all muzak comes to harm, especially since when the market has grown and both companies and musicians (who earn money also through copyrights, with Siae in Italy) have begun to approach the subject in a more intelligent way. There are those who have done this by reducing waiting times to a minimum, making sure that the automatic responders lead the customer to constantly interact through numerical choices to get an answer as quickly as possible, and in this case there is very little or no music at all. Others, knowing that ultimately customers want speed in solving their problems, but still prefer to talk to a human being rather than an answering machine, have invested in music on hold trying to prevent them from becoming, as in the past, repetitive, obsessive and irritating. The first problem is that of the musical genre, which must not be too complex, given the poor quality of listening, not too fast, because no one wants to be further stressed while waiting for an answer, and sufficiently relaxing not to annoy the listener. .
youtube: a version of Opus No 1
Then there is the problem of the duration of the music on hold, which it should never be short, because it would repeat itself creating annoyance to listening: better long pieces or, in the case of prolonged waits, even propose more pieces, which can also be programmed by deejays or experts. Apple, after years of trying, has even arrived at the possibility of personalizing the music on hold on the phone, allowing those who are waiting to choose songs from a playlist. Can successes be created in this way? Maybe yes, if we think about the fact that the music on hold from the National Audit Office English was heard in the past year for a whopping 4.7 million hours and that’s in the United States the song Work No. 1composed of Tim Carleton and Darrick Deel and chosen by Cisco as music on hold for calls, it has become a hit in its own right and has garnered millions of views (and plays) on YouTube.