For decades, it was thought that playing music in our places of work would boost morale and productivity. Before it terrorised hotel guests and shoppers, Muzak originally set out to rally workers with 15-minute cycles of slowly climaxing, terrible music. It makes me feel like Don Draper trapped in a lift. My productivity is peaking only because I want to finish and turn it off.
The BBC piped the uplifting classical music show Music While You Work into factories during the war, but work music fell out of favour among everyone but mechanics and maverick surgeons (a friend of mine recently gave birth by caesarean to the tune of Madonna's Holiday). Now, it seems, office music may be making a return.
PRS for Music, which gathers royalties for the industry, granted 27,000 licences to workplaces to play music last year – 8% more than in 2015. Anecdotal evidence is rife of the widespread streaming of Spotify playlists across desks (doing so without a licence is technically illegal, because it counts as broadcasting).
"For many people here, music is part and parcel of their life," says Karen Byrne, the chief operating officer of Zone, a digital agency in London and Bristol with 260 employees. The company has several Spotify accounts and licenses music from PRS (prices start from about £50 a year). It plays calmer music when "harmony" is required in the business and faster-tempo songs "when people are lagging".
At Tab Media, a startup news network, editor-in-chief Joshi Herrmann recently returned to the New York office to find music playing. "So many offices are silent now, because of headphones," he says. "So, if playing music means fewer headphones, I'm down."
Sven Grundberg works at Soundtrack Your Brand, a Swedish Spotify spin-off that builds playlists for companies. Their clients are mostly retailers, but enquiries from offices are becoming more common. His colleagues – about 70 of them – do not hear music at their desks ("we don't want to force it on people"), but the company plays music in communal areas, where workers can skip tracks and adjust the volume, but not the contents of the playlist. "If you let people play what they want, they play Skrillex and that just pisses everyone off," he warns. Not as much as Muzak's Stimulus Progression, Sven – trust me.
