Annoyed by Restaurant Playlists, a Master Musician Made His Own

First world problem.

My favorite source of background music is "radiocoast.com". Not because it's that great, but because someone figured out a way to beat the music industry. He got a collection of background music records made for the Seeburg 1000 and 2000. Seeburg was a jukebox maker in Chicago. As a sideline they sold background music devices which played a big stack of special records over and over - 1000 or 2000 songs. They bought the rights to the music, and their own orchestra recorded them. So they had full content ownership. The records had a nonstandard groove width, a nonstandard diameter, and a nonstandard hole size; DRM, the early years. They were not copyrighted and predate the "no formalities" copyright law. So anyone with the records can legally distribute the music. Which "radiocoast.com" does.

The thing that drove me bonkers when I used to work in restaurants was the monotony of listening to the same 2-3 hour playlist on repeat all day, every day. Certain songs still trigger me if I hear them today. They're fundamentally linked to the restaurant and I always feel a flood of memories when I hear them.

This is the problem with so many playlists, automated DJs, and the like. You get the monotonous "best hits" compendiums or ham-handed, jarring mixes with no sense of flow.

This is one of the reasons why I ditched Amazon Music. Many of them seem to be programmed by algorithm ... or by people who have no idea what they are doing.

For example, a few years ago I noticed that Walgreens would generally have pretty good pop music playing. But what was most striking was the songs were not hits, or perhaps older hits, even though most were from major label productions.

I have surmised that companies providing these playlists might be able to negotiate better deals with the publishers, directly, giving the publishers (and writers) an opportunity to monetize their back catalog.

in school, i took a wonderful class about computer music, taught by the eccentric composer and charismatic professor Dr. Rodney Waschka III. he dedicated one class to the topic of royalties and the three major artist guilds. we learned that any business that wants to play the radio will usually just pay subscriptions to all three guilds rather than keeping track of royalties owed to individual artists.

when Waschka organized campus concerts in this niche and highly academic field of art, these concerts would naturally be performances of pieces written by himself and his colleagues from other universities... so the university paid royalties to Waschka and his colleagues, who would then use the money to commission each other to compose new pieces.

Starbucks employs music curators: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067250/meet-the-music-nerds-beh...

I saw an article recently which told a tale of trendy coffee shops featuring where obscure but desirable music selected by expert hipster curators. Supposedly, some ask employees to track the number of people they see using Shazam, that being considered a sign of success. I have spent a lot of time in coffee shops while traveling, and I do recall hearing a few songs which stuck with me that I couldn’t find any trace of on the Internet, even after asking in the specific subreddits for the bands related (a unique cover of the Cure, for instance). That certainly doesn’t happen at Dunkin Donuts. Unfortunately I’ve been unable to locate this article.

Nice to see this guy tackled the issue (even if for another setting).