I've got a book on the history of the company (that I got from a library book sale) but I haven't read it.
I don't think that they use subliminal messages in the recordings to get people to buy but there is psychological theory behind the recordings just as there is psychological theory behind painting a dining room's wall's green or the color selected for a waiting room.
Some "anxiety" in the music may be good for keeping shoppers moving (but that can become irritating when a shopper is stuck in a checkout line for over an hour).
Other recordings may be used to make the shoppers sentimental (open the wallet). Then again if one is sentimental for how things were (nostalgia) they may walk away empty handed/with regret seeing nothing but newfangled crap and at today's prices.
I'm listening to Christmas music when I can find one of my tapes or CDs because it just seems so inappropriate to listen to these recordings out of season.
I have read that Muzak company was originally conceived as a patented way to pipe music through the power lines in a building. This gave them a lock on the business when many buildings did not have lines set aside for music.
It seems likely that most Christmas music played in stores is not official Muzak, but whatever can be put together for the minimum royalty payment. Perhaps the music is successful at getting the large majority of sheeple to buy more at the expense of annoying the rest.
The other day in the grocery store I noticed that they were playing Michael Jackson.
I've got a book on the history of the company (that I got from a library book sale)
I'm a big fan of library book sales. There's a lot of junk but a few gems that you might never have picked up at the original price.
Excerpt:
Nov. 12 — You ponder a wine to buy for dinner. Two vintages beckon from the store shelf before you. Should you go with the French white or the German? Similar quality. Identical price.
Which to choose?
Recent British research suggests that the music seeping over the store's sound system might just nudge your mind. "If you hear French music, you should be primed to buy French wine," says Adrian North, a psychology lecturer at the University of Leicester in England who, along with his collaborators, borrowed part of an aisle at the local supermarket to set up just such an experiment.
North and company took four shelves in the wine section and split each in half. A French wine filled one side. A German counterpart filled the other.
A tape deck sat on the top shelf.
Just Beautiful Music
Just as North suspected, the buyers followed the lead of the music. When the tape deck wafted French accordion tunes down the aisle, shoppers bought a total of 40 French wines and only eight German wines. On days when the pounding beat of a German oompah band greeted shoppers, they bought only 12 French wines but 22 bottles of German wine.
"I think it's just a very solid piece of applied research," comments Vladimir Konecni, a psychologist at University of California San Diego who has researched how music affects people's emotions.
For the Leicester researchers, the results, reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, came as an expected surprise.
"Besides being psychologists, we're still human beings," North says. "We were surprised on a personal level. On a psychological level, it's exactly what you would expect." <
The scientists suggest French music triggers thoughts and memories associated with France and thus makes people more likely to buy French wine. Ditto for German music and German wines.
Of the 44 customers who agreed to answer a questionnaire, though, only six admitted the music played a part in their wine decision. "You could argue music has some kind of subliminal influence that people aren't aware of," North says. "I think it's much more likely a second explanation. People just didn't like to admit that they bought wine that happened to coincide with the music that was playing."