Friday, April 14, 2006

The Art of Muzak

Rebecca Blood steers us to this wonderful New Yorker article on the state of Muzak. Among other things, the article touches on two things that I've written about before here and here. First up, we have the omnipresent soundtrack, designed to, um, enhance your shopping experience:

"...Most people walk into a store and hear music, but they never think that somebody actually put thought into what they’re hearing. A song they like is playing, and they’re nodding along with it, or maybe they’re kind of dancing to it and maybe they don’t want anyone to see that they’re dancing. They don’t realize that the song was put there for a purpose, and that there’s a reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. But there is.”

Then, we have the whole retail theatre concept:

Several years later, Collis was doing an engineering job for Muzak. He told me, “I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’t really about selling music. It was about selling emotion—about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.”

Read the whole article and the next time you're out shopping or at a restaurant, take a minute and think about what you're listening to and who might have programmed it.

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