Workers of the World, Unite!
And Make Some Music, While You're At It!

When business and music collide, the unpredictable happens. What does Martha Stewart think about telephone on-hold music? What goes on inside Toyota's "drum room"? And does the string section of Bonn's Beethoven Orchestra want to get paid by the note?

Business Week conducted an informal check of the state of corporate hold music and found that Merrill, IBM General Motors and Dell play classical music, as does their own parent company, The McGraw-Hill Companies. Wal-Mart favors light country and the Salvation Army delivers hymns. Aloof Microsoft offers nothing but silence.

AmIRight.com (also a good source for misheard lyrics and song parodies) offers a list of "bad choices for hold music," which includes Led Zeppelin's "Gallows Pole" for a suicide prevention hotline, Kate Bush's "Get out of my House" for Habitat for Humanity, Smashing Pumpkin's "Disarm" for the National Rifle Association. They invite visitors to suggest new additions to the list.

Read a 1999 Univ. of Cincinnati study of the psychology of hold music. Its major findings included:

• No matter what music was played, the time spent "on hold" was generally overestimated.
• Time spent on hold seemed slightly shorter when light jazz was played, but the effect of music format differed for men and women.
• Among the males, the wait seemed shortest when classical music was played. Among the females, the wait seemed longest when classical music was played. This may be related to differences in attention levels and musical preferences.
• In general, classical music evoked the most positive reactions among males; light jazz evoked the most positive reactions (and shortest waiting time estimates) among females.
• Rock was the least preferred across both gender groups and produced the longest waiting time estimates.

The Why Not? site of Yale academics Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres challenges the orthodoxy of how things are usually done. "Why Not" do it another way, they challenge their visitors.

One visitor, Mason Weisz, offered this idea for hold music: "Instead of being forced to listed to a monolithic, one-way conduit of bad music the next time you're on hold, wouldn't it be great if you could change the station? 'Press 1 for Jazz, press 2 for Top 40, etc.' People would stay on hold longer, which means the businesses who used this would get more customers. I might even call it just to listen to the music! It could be Internet radio, XM, or anything else."

Employees at these companies are among the many around the US that are banging on drums, on company time.

Drum-circle guru Arthur Hull claims that over 3,000 corporations around the world have used him to facilitate corporate drum circles, in which employees learn team work, release frustrations, and build esprit de corps by learning to create group rhythms.

Toyota's US headquarters even features a dedicated drum room, which has been used by thousands of its employees from around the US.

Stroll the MBA Jungle, or visit Hull's "Village Music Circles - facilitating human potential through rhythm"

The string players initiated a lawsuit to get more pay, on the basis that they play more notes than their colleagues in the wind, brass and percussion sections. While the other players are counting rest measures, the strings tend to keep going.

The press has pointed out, in numerous ways, how nonsensical is the framing of the issue in terms of "number of notes played." James Oestreich of the New York Times remarked, "There are notes, and there are notes."

He explained, "To stick with Beethoven, take a simple passage, selected more or less at random, from the scherzo of the Ninth Symphony (measures 77-92). In these 16 bars, the first violins play 34 notes; the second oboist, 16. But the oboist's are measure-filling dotted-half notes, tied together, demanding an almost continuous expenditure of breath. The violinists play three notes in most measures but don't play at all in four of them. Comparisons are not only odious, they are impossible."  He concludes by suggesting the orchestra leaders make a point by calling for a performance Brahms' Serenade No. 2, which was written for an orchestra with NO violins.

In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Pollard reminds us that people come for the piece of music as a whole. "No one has ever paid to hear a specific member of the orchestra play. They come to hear the orchestra as a whole."

In a letter to the editors of the New York Times, Tony & Ian Alterman ask, "What counts as a note?… And should a whole note be worth four times as much as a quarter note?" They also point out each note on a piano is actually three strings, so pianists might consider asking for compensation on a "per string" basis.

Some recent coverage about the lawsuit from Africa and Australia and the New York Times