Appropriate Music for Callers 'On Hold'?

RiBread asks: "I work at a startup, and as such wear many hats. Right now I'm trying to make sure our phone system is useful. One of everyone's biggest complaints is the cheesy music that plays when someone calls in and is put on hold. The stunning MIDI rendition of 'Home on the Range' they hear vies only with the ice cream truck and 'It's a Small World' for its ability to infuriate. I found out we can hook up a CD player to the phone system to alleviate this, but the real question is now: what do we want to play? What's the best 'on hold' music you've heard? (comments with links to samples of music will be most appreciated)"

Comments

Classical music is good

[FattMattP]

Classical music is good, but don't forget about copyrights. Although the music itself may be in the public domain the performance may not be.

Re:Classical music is good

[bakes]

It might or might not be considered different. In Australia, you need a license from APRA in either case.

You can't even play a radio (where fees are already paid by the radio station for each song) in the waiting room without a license. If you have a radio playing at your desk, or in a workshop, that's ok - as long as no customers can hear it.

They have some stupid rules.

Re:Classical music is good

[Seumas]

Yes, you need to license your hold music in America.

BMI Records on Music On Hold


Although, most people buy tapes and CDs thinking they are now their property, there is a distinction in the law between owning a copy of the CD and owning the songs on the CD. There is also a difference between a private performance of copyrighted music and a public performance. Most people recognize that purchasing a CD doesn't give them the right to make copies of it to give or sell to others. The record company and music publishers retain those rights. Similarly, the music on the CDs and tapes still belongs to the songwriter, composer or music publisher of the work. When you buy a tape or CD the purchase price covers only your private listening use, similar to the "home" use of "home" videos. Once you decide to play these tapes or CDs in your business, it becomes a public performance.

Songwriters, composers, and music publishers have the exclusive right of public performance of their musical works under the U.S. copyright law. Therefore, any public performance requires permission from the copyright owner - or BMI - if it is BMI-affiliated music. With a BMI Music Performance Agreement, you can publicly perform all BMI-affiliated music.

Re:Classical music is good

[Mononoke]

RIAA has nothing to do with this. This type of licensing is already covered by BMI & ASCAP (in the US, anyway.)

Here is a well-written article about licensing by BMI, ASCAP, etc.

Believe it or not, there are already exemptions in place for small business who simply play the radio in the background.

Give them a choice!

[Anonymous Coward]

I once called a company that allowed the caller to choose from 8 selections of hold music. They had outstanding musical taste. The company still had terrible service though!

Having looked into this once for my company, you should know that you probably need an ASCAP licence to be legal. Most people don't bother, though.

My company does business in many languages, and our phone system only supports one source of hold music, so they have to choose instrumental-only music so that callers don't get lyrics in a language they don't know...

Re:If you can use a CD Player...

[dan_bethe]

The reason is because you can't get the copyright permission on the public performance of those 10,000 songs. Music on hold (MOH) is a public performance, and companies sell specially licensed collections for that purpose. It's similar to libraries of background music for radio and tv.

Re:ETA

[brc007]

I assume by "ETA" you mean the estimated time until their call will be answered. That is nice, but most phone systems do not support that. The ones that do usually require an additional license to enable that module.

If you haven't heard of it check out the Asterisk PBX. It's GPL licensed and comes with ETA announcements built in :).
It supports VoIP (SIP protocol among others) and Analog phones, T1's, etc.

Check out the 2 port SIPura ATA to interface with 2 FXS ports which allow you to interface with normal Analog phones, or the
SIPura 3000 with two FXS ports and one FXO port which allows you to interface with a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line from the telco.

Stop by and say hello in #asterisk on the irc.freenode.org IRC network (Sorry you've gotta register your nick with nickserv to get in...we've had huge problems with spambots :\) /nickserv help register

/nickserv register mypassword

/nickserv identify mypassword

/join #asterisk

Hopefully these spambots will go away eventually.

Re:Why specifically Music?

[jargonCCNA]

Because that's worse. It's all over PBXen in Canada and it pisses me off. The first time it happens to you, you'll think it's your Call Waiting going off.

best yet...

[RMH101]

...some UK companies pipe live radio stations like Radio 1 to their hold music. you'd need to licence it, but it's always new, doesn't get stale and people *might* not mind listening to it.

Re:morse code

[ThinkingGuy]

You'll get some strange looks in Japan when you start using those Mandarin Chinese phrases on people :)

Don't use live radio

[cdrudge]

Please don't use live radio. I work for a large national hardware chain co-op. I'm on hold frequently waiting for a store to do something and occasionally hear a commercial for a competing store. Think Lowes doing advertising for Home Depot with their hold music.

Re:Variety

[lrucker]

That all said, nothing is more annoying, once there is interesting hold conent, than to have it interrupted every 15 seconds reminding the caller that "Your call is important to us, stay on the line to keep your position, blah, blah.". Say that at most once up-front and never again.

If that message never changes, yeah, but I once dealt with a company that would break with "you are now Nth in line". Depending on N and how quickly it changed, I knew whether it was worth it to hang on or just leave a message.

Re:Britney Spears

[harrkev]

It sounds like you don't know much about queueing theory. If each event/customer is essentially random, then there are formulas that you can plug into. Customers can be modeled as Markovian processes.

The best that you can do is shoot for no wait for a certain percentage of the time (usually between 70-99%). Because it is possible every customer might call at exactly the same time (but it is extremely unlikely), you have to have one rep for each customer. This is an extreme example, but this is the sort of thing that you have do deal with in probabilities.

75% no-wait service is cheap.
90% no-wait service is a little more expensive
95% no-wait service is VERY expensive
99% no-wait service will bankrupt even Microsoft (even if they were capable of solving your problem)