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And Finally Business News
Working with repetitious playlists a bit like actual torture
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 26 February 2019
Music’s great, isn’t it? I’m all in favour. And it provides such a great boost for businesses that it’s the law that anyone who wants to play music to their customers has to pay for the privilege. So, brilliant all round. Unless you’re the employee of a shop or café with a repetitive playlist. Then, argues one writer, it is similar to actual torture.
“[It’s] the same system that’s used to flood people out of the Branch Davidian in Waco or was used on terror suspects in Guantanamo”, writer and former coffee shop employee Adam Johnson tells CBC’s ‘The Current’. “They use the repetition of music. I’m not suggesting that working at Applebee’s is the same as being at Guantanamo, but the principle’s the same”.
This follows recent complaints by Starbucks staff in the US about being forced to listen to the ‘Hamilton’ soundtrack on repeat. It’s a delight to hear songs from the hit musical as you buy a crappy cup of coffee from the chain. Less so if you’re serving that crappy coffee on an eight hour shift, it turns out.
Neuroscientist Jessica Grahn explains that music “can be a very effective way of the external environment impinging, without our control, on our sensory processing. Because we can’t close our ears, it’s very effective if somebody else has control of our sonic environment. We can do nothing about that, and that can be pretty debilitating”.
Johnson argues that the matter should be thought of as an environmental health concern, and therefore checked and considered in the same way as the cleanliness of a commercial kitchen. Meanwhile, Grahn says issues can be overcome without going that far by allowing staff to have input on the music they listen to while working.
Customers can, of course, also become enraged by the music they hear while shopping, sipping crappy coffee or eating some lovely food. Last year, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto revealed that he’d become so annoyed by the music played in his favourite restaurant in New York that he’d created a new playlist for it.
“I cannot bear it”, he told the New York Times of situations where terrible music is being played in a public space, but “normally I just leave”. However, “this restaurant is really something I like and I respect their chef”, so he vowed to come up with a solution.
And it seems to have worked for him, so maybe letting Starbucks staff have a go at curating the music is a good plan. Maybe they’ll make better coffee as a result. Unlikely, I know, but probably worth a try. I’m sure it’s not an entirely lost cause like, say, Costa. You might as well just play the Crazy Frog on a loop there and be done with it.
