In recent years, the quality of piped music has changed, from relatively soft sounds to hard, thumping, aggressive, and louder sounds on any and all occasions. Restaurants have all of a sudden become noisy places operating on the assumption that the more background noise the better. Transmitting upsetting noise is an infringement of the rights of individuals.

Humphries Opposes Muzak

For John Humphries, Radio 4 presenter, piped music is a "sinister evil" that must be eradicated. He took direct action in a Sheffield hotel, asking for the muzak to be turned off. When he was told by the management that the customers liked it, he took his own straw poll, and found that they all agreed with him. The manager finally agreed to turn it off when the Today presenter threatened to leave if the wishes of the customers were not upheld.
 

This site will help you to protest about the increasing use of muzak by national and international companies in Britain. Generally, the public has little choice about this: music is streamed at us, without our permission, choice, or control, as a commercial ploy to make us spend more. This is a misuse of music and an abuse of the company relationship with us, their customers.

The idea is simple: this site will provide addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and web site addresses when this is relevant so that you are able to quickly and easily make a complaint. It also provides a listing of pubs, restaurants, and cafes that do not play piped music.

If you find yourself increasingly frustrated, irritated and annoyed by the presence of muzak in public places, make a complaint. At the very least this might relieve some of your frustration, and it might even make a difference.

The Parliamentary Agenda

Robert Key, MP for Salisbury, introduced a bill in parliament to ban piped music. He called piped music "a pollution from which there is no escape. It can be heard in public places including doctors' surgeries, swimming pools and bus and railway stations. All music is devalued if treated as acoustic wallpaper. The public hate being trapped with someone else's choice of music, be it on a plane, a bus, or in a queue on the telephone".

However, while the EC is working on a huge noise reduction programme, including a green paper and framework document, the UK seems to be dragging its feet and our policy makers are treating this issue, and us, with negligence. Robert Key's bill was defeated in the house.

October 2004: Val Weedon, UK Noise Association, has set up an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Noise Reduction. It is chaired by Labour MP Jonathan Shaw. The vice chairs are Robert Key and Bob Russell, who has put his name down for an adjournment debate on noise. UKNA details: 2nd Floor, Broken Wharf House, 2 Broken Wharf, London EC4V 3DT.

 

The Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schafer has questioned the validity of Muzak's claim to 'mask' less desirable sounds such as factory machines or supermarket clatter. He has satirised the famous brand-name, calling it 'Moo-zak' and has described the product, in its growing ubiquity, as an invasion of privacy and a denial of freedom of choice. He also sees in Muzak the seed of a general dulling of aesthetic sensitivity, whereby the inescapable exposure to its quasi-music could make unwary ears gradually less and less receptive to the conscious listening experiences not only of true art- and entertainment-music but also of the natural environment.

Disablity Discrimination Act

This law covers all kinds of disability, for instance people with autism or poor eyesight, or a hearing impairment. The implication is that organisations and businesses are required to think about keeping background noise down, or using bigger type on signs to make them more readable, or to consider the needs of other disabled people. If you are an employee, for example, you might try to get your employer to agree that you are covered by this act since you cannot tolerate music of any kind at work. Your problem may be that you have a phobia about muzak (this might be covered by the mental health section of the Act) or you are hearing impaired and muzak therefore creates an aversive workplace and reduces your productivity and performance considerably. It might be that you would have a case for compensation.

Christmas Muzak

Shop workers feel as if they are terrorised all day. Especially Jingle Bells. It arouses aggressive feelings. Gottfried Rieser, Austrian union of shop workers.

Manchester Airport did a survey on how to make the place appealing at Christmas. Almost half said no festive music was a good start.

Some workers have taken the annoyance of Christmas muzak seriously - declaring festive songs a health and safety concern. Two years ago the Austrian union of shop workers threatened legal action.

"Shop workers can't escape the Christmas muzak. They feel as if they are terrorised all day. Especially Jingle Bells. It arouses aggressive feelings," said spokesman Gottfried Rieser.

Faced with unyielding store-owners, union lawyers agreed to a voluntary code of practice limiting festive music to peak shopping hours... with limited success. However, we await further developments......

Britons have constantly complained about piped music. A survey this year by the recruitment website Retailchoice.com found that Christmas is the most testing time for shop workers, and that almost half have had complaints about piped music from customers.

"That is acoustic torture," says Nigel Rodgers of Pipedown, a celebrity-fronted pressure group against muzak. "It's not loud but the repetitive nature causes psychological stress."

The group wants the government to legislate against unwanted music, be it in stores, hospitals, airports or swimming pools, claiming it raises the blood pressure and depresses the immune system.

It is a scientific fact that the quality of music played in a car is inversely proportional to the volume at which it is played. So the chances are, if music from a car in the next lane is so loud you can feel it through your brake pedal, it's going to be a moronic barrage of whistles, clicks and low frequency excretions.

The large number of people who dislike muzak tend to avoid shops in which muzak is played. This artificially biases the retailers own in-shop customer surveys, which show a higher level of indifference to or liking of muzak than that shown by independent, population-wide surveys. Therefore, it is not enough to avoid shops in which muzak is played - your opinion and voice is lost if you only stay away. In order for businesses to get the message that a significant number of potential customers are staying away, and that muzak is affecting brand image, customer relations, and market share, you must also complain.

Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, one ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Bk. v, ch. 1 (Carlyle, tr.)


Complaining Tip! If you get no sense from the Customer Relations department of a company it is often better to write to the Director. Their names and addresses can be obtained from Companies House at 21 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3X2. Tel. 0870 3333636. There is a minimal fee for this information.

Much of the music that surrounds us acts as a kind of aural tranquilliser. So-called elevator music is not confined to elevators: music that expunges any unfamiliar element, any hint of complexity or self-development saturates the private and public spaces of modern life. This music is inane, stupid, and empty in the same way that repetitive and undeveloped writing is stupid, full of clichés and non-sequiturs, attempting to pass off empty and worn-out phrases as vehicles of genuine thought and emotion. Julian Johnson. Who Needs Classical Music?

December 2003. Labour unions in the Czech Republic demanded that stores stop playing Christmas carols incessantly or pay compensation for causing emotional trauma to sales clerks. Some stores play the same songs all day, and play them loudly, as do many shops across in the world. Employees say shifts have become unbearable. "To listen to it for eight hours a day is not healthy, that's for sure," said Alexandr Leiner, a union leader. "And for the customers, it's almost unbearable as well."

Leiner said unions have written to major chains and demanded that employees be compensated. He said the unions want $19 or two days off as a possible compensation. They've received no response.

Unions in neighbouring Austria have lodged similar complaints against stores there.

Tesco has denied that anyone has a problem with the muzak played in its shops.

 

A 32-year-old club promoter, Michael Carreras, was driving his Jaguar, windows down and sunroof open, listening to a 50 Cent CD, at five in the damn morning. This would be an affront to decency anywhere, but in Miami Beach it is illegal for your car stereo to be audible from 100 feet away. A passing cop issued Mr Carreras with a summons. When Mr Carreras fronted the beak, the great Judge Swartz said: "You impose your music on me, I'm going to impose my music on you." He presented Carreras with a choice: a US$500 fine, or sitting through two-and-a-half hours of La Traviata. Carreras opted to endure the Verdi. The estimable Judge Swartz has recognised that there are few greater menaces to the happiness of the city-dweller than the person - “I say "person", I mean "ignorant, antisocial cretin" - who broadcasts unnecessary noise. A generous dose of their own medicine is the least these vermin deserve. It is time, surely, to update the legal code in this country, to enable judges to sentence the noisy to a punishment that fits their crime. Few things are as distressing to the spirit as music we don't wish to hear”.

The cost of providing piped music by stores, pubs, restaurants, etc., is enormous. The figure for a 30,000 sq. ft store is at least £2000 p.a. - multiplied throughout an organisation the sums are huge. These costs include royalties to organisations who have copyright, the equipment, CD's and overheads. The public is generally unaware of the costs that are added to the cost of goods in the shops. This is why Wetherspoons, a pub chain that does not use muzak, can sell food and drinks much cheaper than most other outlets.

Britney's Muzak Voted Most Annoying (October, 2005)

Britney Spears' songs voted as the worst in-store music by fashion store workers. Fashion sales associates are driven crazy by having to listen to the non-stop songs that provide the soundtrack to their working lives. Three-in-four sales people in London high fashion stores admit being irritated by in-store music, with Britney the most annoying followed by Usher, Kylie Minogue and 50 Cent.

A staggering 31 per cent of shop workers have to endure the same album between six and 20 times a week, with 16 per cent hearing the same record more than 20 times during the course of a week. Those working in the fashion and footwear retail sectors suffer the most from muzak according to the research by recruitment website Retailchoice.com. And it is not just the staff whose nerves are being tested. Four-in-10 shop workers receive complaints from customers about the maddening music played in the store.

Why, then, do the shops play this stuff? Are they operating under the delusion that people actually like it?

I refuse to die to this music!
By Chris Schuler

I was saddened to hear of the death the other day of the colourful Green Party (and former Liberal) peer Lord Beaumont of Whitley. Tim Beaumont was a tireless advocate of green causes, homosexual law reform, animal rights and voluntary euthanasia, but one concern of his has received comparatively little attention. He was a long-term supporter of Pipedown, the campaign for freedom from piped music, and in 2006 introduced a Private Member’s Bill to ban piped music and televisions in public areas of hospitals.

Canned music in hospitals, GPs’ waiting rooms and dentists’ surgeries is particularly offensive as you have no choice but to be there, and are unlikely to be feeling your best in the first place. But many people find it obnoxious everywhere else, too. In the 10 years since 17 per cent of respondents told the NOP that canned music was “the single thing most detested about modern life”, it has become all but ubiquitous in restaurants, hotels, cafés, bars, shops – including, unbelievably, bookshops – banks and practically every other public place. In Belgium they even pump it into the streets out of little loudspeakers attached to the lamp posts.

As an attempt at emotional manipulation, canned music is often ludicrously misjudged. The stupid song playing in a café when you’re breaking up with a lover, or in a motorway service station on the way to a funeral, offends by being so grotesquely inappropriate. The emotional overdrive of the dance floor is hardly an appropriate accompaniment to a reflective cup of coffee in the afternoon. And the alienated electronica of chill-out music may be fine to calm the adrenaline of a night’s clubbing, but on a wet Wednesday morning it can be downright dispiriting.

It’s anathema to musicians of all persuasions, since their training and instincts dispose them to listen to music, rather than screen it out. In his Reith Lectures a couple of years ago, Daniel Barenboim launched a scathing attack on canned music. Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, in his entertaining gastronomic travelogue Sound Bites, opines that the only appropriate soundtrack to fine dining is the gentle murmur of conversation and the quiet clink of glasses and cutlery. And André Previn, when his flight ran into turbulence and the crew piped “soothing” music through the PA, complained: “I refuse to die to this music!”

I’m not a purist about such things. There are certain bars and cafés where it seems a perfectly appropriate and agreeable part of the ambience. The problem is that it’s increasingly difficult to find any public space that’s free of it. Where do you go for a quiet drink after a concert or recital when you want to stay with the afterglow of the music you’ve just heard, not have it dissipated immediately by someone else’s choice of aural wallpaper? Silence should be the default position, music a conscious choice; increasingly, background music is the default position, and silence an extreme – and usually expensive – rarity.