At The Shop…

I recently had the distinctly distasteful experience of shoe shopping.  I dislike shopping for shoes.  Most stores do not carry shoes in my size, and, if they do, their selection is very often a choice between ugly and bad looking. But while last week’s visit to the shoe shop did not yield a new pair of kicks, it did provide some insight into the music business and also some useful reminders about how pop music is constructed.

Like just about everywhere else on earth, the shoe shop (where I spent way too long anguishing over the poor choices their buyers had made) was playing background music through loudspeakers scattered around the store. This place made use of speakers that were hidden in the ceiling. Since they were out of sight, the effect was that the music was truly part of the ambiance. Of course, that was the idea: the music, along with the decorations, architecture, lighting, and store smell helped create helped create what the owners deemed to be just the right set of attributes to provide a pleasant (and therefore mutually beneficial) shopping experience.

So, what about that background music? What music is played? Who writes and produces it? Who selects what to play? Continue reading “Shoe Shopping and Other Musical Experiences” →