So here's how I spent almost 2 hours of my time last night. Something was wrong with the Movable Type installation on my old blog at stcynic.com. I couldn't access any of the cgi files to do anything with it, so I called tech support for the web hosting service. I am informed that the wait will be 15 minutes, which I figure is okay. I just played a game on my computer while I waited. Unfortunately, the on-hold music was the worst I've ever heard in my life. It was this bizarre mix of quasi-rap/dance music versions of classic rock songs. They all had that basic dance beat background you hear on all dance remixes, but the guitar riffs and vocals were the same. And every 30 seconds or so you'd hear a voice say "Rock the house" for no apparent reason. Did you know they had a muzak dance version of Joan Jett's I Love Rock and Roll and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gimme Three Steps? I didn't either. And frankly, I was a lot happier not knowing.
The 15 minute wait was absolutely brutal, topped off a dance muzak version of Naughty Naughty (Naughty, naughty, t-t-t-t-tease me....ROCK THE HOUSE....please continue waiting, your call will be answered by the next available person....t-t-t-t-tease me...). It was like some sort of CIA psychological endurance test. This wouldn't be legal under the Geneva Convention for a prisoner of warm, much less a paying customer. Finally a tech answers the phone, spends 7 or 8 minutes saying "Hmmmm" over and over again - and then he hung up on me. I called back and was told my wait would be 22 minutes this time. More torture.
Ultimately, we did manage to fix the problem, but it took nearly two hours of being subjected to the worst music I've ever heard in my life. Which leads me to this question: what kind of musician would take a job making crap like that? Someone had to arrange that music and record it and they had to know they were destroying otherwise great music. And I don't wanna hear how they did it for the money - you don't see out of work engineers out blowing up bridges and buildings and ruining the work of others. This was musical terrorism, and I'm all for putting the purveyors of it in Gitmo and throwing away the key.
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Musicians are funny people. A friend of mine is a pianist, a good one. He plays the bars around town in an old-school funk band, and leads his own jazz quartet, and accompanies a pretty well-known jazz singer. Needless to say, these projects can't pay the bills, so my friend ends up setting background music to crappy reality shows, and composing segues for excercise videos, and playing three seconds of generic jazz for frozen pizza commercials.
I imagine that these things all kill him a little inside, but there's simply not a lot of options for someone who wants to do creative work and get paid. People, apparently, would rather stay home and watch 14-year-old punk kids who've never had to work to entertain an indifferent audience showcase their Stevie Wonder impressions on American Idol than go to a club and pay a couple of bucks to drink a beer and watch real musicians at work, ones who know how to put on a show, who've had experience with reluctant audiences, who aspire to more than the cover of People.
What do you think those tech support people are doing while you are on hold? They are actually under-employed musicians, who spend most of their time arranging the music tracks that you listen to while on hold. They only answer the phone when they get tired of messing up other people's music.
Makes Celine Dion start to sound pretty good, don't it? :)
The reason for the music is simple enough. It lets you the loyal customer know that your call is still live, and studies show it leads you to staying on line longer than you might otherwise tolerate dead air.
But what music? You just can't plug into the local radio feed as they might not play what you want and will bombard your clients with unwanted ads. Not to mention there might be legal problems with licensing. And you just can't slap a CD in the phone system because you'll get dinged for both song title copyright (unless the song is so old its in public domain) and mechanical recording copyright infractions. Businesses get around this by getting CD's from companies that already have gotten title permission, and by recording original versions also get around mechanical copyright. Different companies ordering different batches of music depending on the image they want to project.
No one says the re-recordings have to be good though. Cheapness is important.
Cheapness is important.
As the wait time amply shows. Two hours dealing with a problem in web hosting?
I have a different theory. I think the music is brutally bad precisely so you don't stay on the line.
Interestingly enough, while I didn't read the whole article I recently saw a header for an article that stated that customers were less likely to resent being kept on hold if they were provided decent music while waiting.
I've been in various phases of phone and/or online tech support the last few years. And the funny thing that the customer never hears is that as you dial deeper into company-only help lines and various specialized testing services, the music only gets worse.There was one service I used to call multiple times per shift that ran nothing but a two minute loop of the worst recording of Pachelbel's Canon in D ever recorded. It almost had to have been someone's kid playing, because the missed notes were just awful.
One place I worked had the brilliant idea of running the Muzak feed over the hold line. Not perfect, but much beeter.
Muzak is generaly in MIDI format so someone need only input the arrangement they want and it plays back through sampled instruments straight from the sheet music.