“Imagine a nice restaurant where you hear only the sounds of silverware scraping plates”
Sounds like my kind of place. Music is everywhere today. My local gas station pumps it outside so I can enjoy their country or rap while I fill up. A local fast good place blasts to into an outside seating area so that everyone in the strip mall can enjoy Madonna.
The other day, I ate with my wife at a restaurant. At first, I thought it was music free, but it was there, just barely hearable. It was great - I could carry on a conversation and not be assaulted with music I didn’t ask for or want.
Here’s a great way for many businesses to save money - turn off the music.
People used to actually sit and listen to music. Classical, Jazz, Rock — you knew names of the people playing the instruments. You could focus on the drumming, or the bass, or the guitar. And it was worth focusing because it wss interesting. So you sat and you listened.
Much of pop music today is just a throb with a singer. it’s elevator music.
If you ask my kids what kind of music I like, they’ll say, “elevator music”. I play guitar in a senior center band and we play mostly 20’s - 40’s songs. My brother once asked me why I didn’t play 50’s and 60’s songs from when we were growing up. I asked him, “You mean like Fats Domino?” He says, “Yeah, Blueberry Hill is one of my favorites.” I replied, “It was written in 1940.”
Who can hear music in restaurants anymore with all the darn tvs going? Ha-ha.
The ones who are actually going to be hit hardest by this are the internet stations playing new non-big label music material. TuneIn already refuses to stream one of my favorite stations because they play material from small independent artists, the folks that sell their stuff on bandcamp. If a song can’t be identified as an officially licensed product, it must be illegal, therefore it can’t be played and they ban the station.
I can understand mood music in a restaurant. But nowadays, it’s pervasive. You can’t walk into a clothing store or even buy groceries without having your brain assaulted by cloying, thin-voiced girly bands or moronic (c)rap gibberish. I’ve taken to walking out of places that blare the “tunes.” I come to shop, not hop.
That was probably a result of the famous strike by ASCAP in 1941 in which it refused to allow songs written by its members to be played on the radio. As a result, radio stations would play songs by BMI writers or songs that were in public domain such as those by the nineteenth century composer Stephen Foster. Foster's Jeannie With The Light Brown Hair got so much air play that students at UCLA burned Jeannie in effigy, and "Jeannie" jokes were popping up in popular culture long after the dispute was settled.