For Your Ears Only
New ways of living, new ways of listening
I am at the local cafe with no music. Again. I find myself here often.
Here’s what it sounds like:
It’s the only one around here. The other cafes all come with music, like it or lump it.
These folks stopped when they got a demand letter from one of the performing rights organizations, ASCAP or BMI, to pay a licensing fee. The price was too steep, so these owners decided to go silent rather than pay it. And what do you know, it’s actually a competitive advantage.
It’s not that I need the cafe to provide music. I can listen on earbuds, and with earbuds I can choose what I listen to. I may need wild sax squawking or droning electronic sin waves depending on what I’m doing. The person next to me is living their own moment and also needs their own soundtrack.
I can hardly choose otherwise – if you’re connected to the Internet there is a constant background stream of recommendations to check out. And if there is background music in the cafe, it clashes with what’s coming in over the Internet.
As far as I can tell cafes have barristas choose the songs and set the volume. When the barrista is an excellent DJ I like discovering music through them. But this is rare. In my neighborhood there is one cafe with great Djing, and many with bad DJing. Bad DJs play the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack loud in the morning, or sit on the same old Neutral Milk Hotel tracks again and again. Unlike all the customers on laptops, a barrista can’t wear earbuds! So they actually do need music out loud. But the customers have the opposite need.
Background music out loud is not a need or a benefit. It’s a problem. This quiet little cafe is full of people with customized audio environments on earbuds. To us, the room is as full of sound as we want it to be be.
And if it’s quiet, it’s because we want it that way. It’s not quiet, it’s personalized.
I don’t mean to be a grumpy curmudgeon. The opposite; I mean to point out that new ways of living call for new ways of listening. Down with music out loud!
(Photo credit: Nevit Dilmen)
