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.

Why specifically Music?

[hashinclude]

The purpose of call-hold music is to indicate that you have not hung up. So why not send soft beeps, once in a while, so that

(a) the exchange does not terminate the call thinking that there is no activity

(b) the listener doesnt get pissed off listening to some (great?) music played over a crap 3KHz bandwidth phone line

I'd suggest downtempo electronica / acid jazz

[Laxitive]

For a commercial music, you want to try to offend as few people as possible, while still playing interesting music that people won't mind listening to. Generally you want it to be instrumental, apolitical, and good.

You don't want to be playing The Clash or blaring Radiohead out to the world.

Downtempo electronica and acid jazz fit that bill perfectly. They have a certain amount of respectability because they generally sample jazz and mix it with electronic beats and modulations to produce very "chill out" music. It's not hard on the ears, it's not loud. It's quiet and relaxing, and still good. The nice thing is, there's a lot of it that is purely instrumental. No annoying vocals to deal with, so you have to neither risk alienating people with controversial vocals, nor dumb down vocals to the point where they are stupefyingly trite and banal.

For concrete suggestions, try the following:
Suzuki by Tosca
Bricolage by Amon Tobin

Another choice you have is to play straight up good Jazz. Put on some Coltrane or Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock or something. There's no fucking way anybody can be offended by that music. It's all instrumental, and it's all rock solid.

Jazz and jazz-based electronica seem to be a perfect fit for what you're looking for in terms of: apolitical, instrumental, and good.

-Laxitive

Why put on hold at all?

[gehrehmee]

In this day and age, I'm really genuinely surprised at how common being on hold is. Let the customer input their phone number, leave a message, or whatever, and get the next available person to just call them. The customer doesn't have to hold a phone to their head for an hour. They don't have to tie up their phone line. They can listen to whatever music they want, watch TV, make food, or pretty much do whatever it was they were doing before they had to call you.

Re:Why put on hold at all?

[mcowger]

An interesting variant of that for people who dont do well punching a phone number into a computer is the following (which I know that at least one company, SpectraLogic, does).

You call the support line, and you wait on hold a max of about 1 minute. A real human answers the phone, and he/she takes your name, number, brief problem description (this is a tech support line) down and you hang up. The issue is assigned to arep, who calls you back when they are ready. Its like the OP's system, but you get to talk to a real person, and hear an ETA, or give them 2 contacts numbers, etc, because a human answers. Works really well for me.

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.

Rant in list form: Phone etiquette for companies

[Grabble]

You asked about what on-hold music to use. I'm going to pretend you said, "Give me input on phone-related stuff for my company."

1) NEVER blame "unusual call volume" for hold times. God, that makes me sick. It's a sneaky way of saying "It's not our fault you're on hold." Yeah, it is.

2) When the caller has finished their business, NEVER ask "Is there anything else I can help you with blah blah blah?". "No." "Okay then, thank you for calling Ultrablather Systems Software Systems Incorporated." STFU and say goodbye like any normal polite person and let me get off the goddamn phone.

3) NEVER have a phone system that constantly reminds me every 30 seconds that your sorry I'm holding and blah blah blah. If you're not gonna have enough people to eliminate the wait, at least let me wait in peace.

4) If your phone system requires me to punch numbers in, you better be sure your system rewards my effort. Being asked for the info I just punched in makes me want punch in your face.

5) Make sure the hold music is QUIET.

6) Play Dixieland music, simply because nobody does. Added bonus: It uses banjos.

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:Variety

[Flexagon]

And why stop at a fixed playlist? This has so many {exciting,absurd} possibilities. 1) Offer menu choices. 2) If you've got caller ID, remember the setting for that customer's next call. 3) Think of things that would work well on an open speakerphone that the caller's probably using in a cube.

As for selections, sure, you could go with generic popular music, but, particularly if there are selectable options, I'd try for more things at the absurd/fun/useful end of the scale, like:

• Raymond Scott, say, Powerhouse.
• Teletypes, like an old newsroom.
• A scripted, busy call center with crazy discussions going on. You and a few cohorts could do this yourselves, avoiding licensing issues, and making it a tongue-in-cheek version of your company's business. Your company would have to have the right culture for this.
• A news feed.
• The Jeopardy final question theme, if your call answering statistics are good enough.
• Sound effects: waves crashing, coffee percolating, someone typing very rapidly (so the caller sounds busy to people in the neighboring cubes), cars racing.
• Tips of the day for your product or service.

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.

AMBIENT

[Feztaa]

Find some AMBIENT music from any musician. I would personally recommend Aphex Twin's ambient works, but that's personal taste.

Remember, hold music is meant to just remind the caller that the line has not, in fact, gone dead and that they are still on the line. It should not be anything catchy or particularly enjoyable (because everybody has different tastes and there's no such thing as a song that every person will enjoy).

So just pick something ambient. Preferrably it'll be calming, with no beat.

Whatever you do, please god, don't play popular mainstream music.

Re:Variety

[Mattcelt]

You're welcome to use my solo piano album, license-free. It is currently used at several other places as on-hold music, and some people actually ask to be put on hold to hear it from time to time!

There are twelve tracks, more than enough music to handle most on-hold situations without repitition.

All I ask is that you give me credit if anyone asks, and point them to my site. Oh, and please let me know if you use it - I like to know!

Email me privately if you want more information.

Mattcelt

Live DJ

[Webmoth]

I don't know if they still do, but Symantec used to have a live DJ running the on-hold music, along with "traffic reports" saying how many people were on hold, and what the average wait time is.