Please don't do this...

[ffutures]

According to Private Eye it now costs £1600 in performance rights fees to provide piped music to a 10,000 foot area, e.g. a department store. Marks and Sparks just dropped muzak, presumably for this reason.

It occurs to me that there's probably a lucrative market for anyone who is prepared to write a computer program that will generate random music that isn't subject to performance rights payments for this purpose and for e.g. call waiting. All evidence suggests that quality is VERY low on the agenda of the people who use this stuff, so it doesn't need to be GOOD music.

Is this an unfilled market niche, or are there possible snags - such as Performancee Rights Payments still being charged and going to the programmer?

Comments

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

There was an article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36424854) recently about the different responses to piped music among different kinds of shoppers - apparently, while piped music increases sales amongst impulse shoppers (presumably more so if a genre which relates to the shoppers), 'contemplative' shoppers, which are more M&S's clientèle spend less in the face of background music.

So it may well have been a combination of cost-reduction and a hope that sales would pick up ...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Plausible. I don't actually like piped music myself, I was just curious about ways out of the PRS quasi-monopoly.