Elevator music. Oldies radio stations. Piped-in smooth jazz.
If you think that’s all you are going to hear on the job these days, think again.
Technology has made music ubiquitous, but everyone’s daily experiences with it have become increasingly personalized. For people who get to listen to music at work, is it corporate policy or personal compromise that dictates their daily soundtrack?
The answer is both. As companies strive to increase efficiency, they look toward creating a more comfortable, and therefore productive, work environment. That often means being able to listen to what you want, when you want.
But whether you work in a burger joint or at the post office, the music you play also affects your customers.
Bruce McFadden, a U.S. Postal Service employee at the Masonic Building post office on the 16th Street Mall, said his office is unique because employees can play almost anything – as long as it’s not offensive.
“We have to be conscious of being in a retail setting, but our policy is that everybody gets the opportunity to listen to the music they want,” said McFadden. “There’s no question that since our manager respects us enough to allow that freedom, it makes the work environment so much more pleasant.”
For McFadden, it’s not unusual to enter the office to the strains of Violent Femmes, Sergio Mendes or Ella Fitzgerald. And yes, the indie duo the Postal Service is a favorite too.
“Whenever we play that CD we’ll have at least one customer say, ‘Do you know what you’re listening to?’ We like it a lot.”
Boulder resident Chelsea Hershelman, who works in accounts payable at hotel furnisher Benjamin West, relishes her ability to listen to Internet radio and audio books at her computer.
“I’ve discovered a lot of great authors that way,” she said. “Or if I find a CD I really like I’ll pass it onto one of my (co-workers) and that way we get to discover new music.”
At her office, respect for others’ space is paramount, even if it’s not an environment the public has access to.
“We don’t crank it up or anything,” she said, noting that the sounds of her co-workers selections occasionally drift across the room.
Chipotle, on the other hand, is all about pushing its music tastes on the public and, ideally, educating them in the process. “Diversity” is the word at the wildly successful chain of fast-casual Mexican restaurants: The Denver-based company’s network contains nearly 3,000 songs from an eclectic mix of artists, including Beck, Lucinda Williams, Van Morrison, Cat Power and Frederico Aubele.
Joe Stupp, “manager of duct tape and plungers” (a.k.a. customer service) and arbiter of music at Chipotle, said he chooses what to play based on what he and his co-workers listen to around the office. After an informal consensus emerges, they make a “chip mix” CD, with titles like “Sea Monkeys in Space” and “A Better Mouse Trap,” and send it to Muzak to license the tracks for play at the restaurants.
“We’re not real hyper-specific about what we want to play,” said Stupp. “We try for stuff that the hipsters might like and that also might not offend the grandpas. We definitely look at it as a very important part of our whole restaurant system and not just background music.”
Chris Arnold, Chipotle’s “director of hoopla, hype and ballyhoo,” said the company’s employees go out of their way to promote their own tastes at the stores.
“If doing it that way we can broaden people’s musical horizons in any way, that’s a good thing,” said Arnold.
Stupp said Chipotle, already a sponsor of several music festivals and radio programs, is considering selling select CDs at its stores, the way Starbucks does.
So whatever happened to the banal smooth- jazz covers that defined “elevator music” in past decades, from shopping malls to skyscraper lobbies? It’s been replaced by lifestyle music – inoffensive pop-rock ballads that soothe and promote consumption.
And if you’re hearing that latest Coldplay single at the Gap, there’s a good bet it was delivered by Muzak, now one of the largest workplace media companies in the world, with more than 400,000 clients.
“We stopped doing the ‘elevator music’ thing almost three decades ago,” said Karen Vigeland, spokesperson for Muzak. “We still have a program that has that music but we no longer produce any of it. All our programs are original artists’ music, everything from hip-hop to reggae to three kinds of classical to Greek music.”
Even with its changing services – the company now offers satellite and TV packages – Vigeland said many people still hold misconceptions about Muzak, whose name has become synonymous with bland background tunes.
“The general perception is that Muzak is stuck in the past, or it’s meant to be annoying or pacifying or dull,” she said. “When people go to a dentist’s office and they hear a tapped-out version of their favorite Beatles song, they think we’re the ones to blame. We also hear rumors of subliminal messages in songs at grocery stores, but we don’t do that.”
From the Muzak home office in Fort Mill, S.C., the company serves more than 100 million listeners a day and boasts a franchise network with 2,000 employees.
And yes, they have an elevator in the building, and no, it doesn’t play music.
Whether you’re behind the counter or in front of it, workplace music also has the ability to create connections.
“What’s amazing is how sophisticated our customers are,” said the Postal Service’s McFadden. “We play pretty obscure stuff, but I’ll be helping somebody and they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s that song from 35 years ago.’ We have almost a little sophisticated radio station down here.”
Music can strengthen relations between managers and their employees too, especially if the former accepts feedback.
“If there’s a really dumb song we picked the (employees) will let us know, and we’ll get rid of it,” said Chipotle’s Stupp.
“Sometimes they’ll send stuff in and if we like it we’ll get it on there. But we’ve got to systemetize it a little bit and have an arbiter, or else we’d have metal and the Dead Kennedys playing all the time. No offense to the Dead Kennedys.”
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-820-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
