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

[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: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.

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.