Background music in your office, without Buma and Sena

What else you get

Your team listens all day In an office the people listening are mostly your own staff. Someone sits there eight hours a day, five days a week, at the same desk. That is a different audience from a shop, where someone browses for twenty minutes. A fixed list of three hundred tracks cannot carry that.

New tracks every day After three weeks everyone recognises the intros and half your team knows which track comes next. With RadioMatic the music is generated rather than pulled from a list. So the style stays put, and the tracks are new every day.

Drinks and fire drills announced Between the tracks the DJ moments name your company. You can add your own announcements too, such as the Friday drinks starting at five, the evacuation drill on Tuesday or the new colleagues sitting on the third floor. You type it in and you hear it on the next round, in the voice you pick. You need no studio and no recorded tape for that. Want music only for a while, then you switch the DJ moments off.

No recruitment adverts On the hour a short news round can follow with the weather and the traffic. You decide which subjects go in. Third-party advertising never comes in between, so no recruitment agency or competitor is advertising in your open-plan office. With more locations you run everything from a single dashboard. Each building keeps its own mood, its own announcements and its own working hours.

Which music works in an office?

Music against office noise In an office music has a job of its own. It has to make an open floor bearable without anyone starting to listen to it. In an open-plan office everyone hears every phone call and every keyboard. A soft, even layer of music covers that.

Few vocals for concentration For colleagues who have to concentrate, that gives more than silence does. Tracks with a lot of words and a recognisable chorus do not help, because then your head starts listening along. So go for little singing, few jumps in volume and an even tempo.

Brighter in the morning The music can sound different per part of the day. Before nine it can be brighter, because the first people come in with a coat and a coffee and the floor is still empty. Between ten and twelve it is work time and the music belongs in the background.

More pulse after lunch After lunch many offices have a dip, and something with a bit more pulse fits there. At the end of the afternoon it can loosen up again. With RadioMatic you set that per part of the day and it runs on by itself, without anyone having to click another list at two o’clock.

Coffee corner, meetings and phone booths Not every space in an office wants the same thing. The coffee corner and the reception desk can sound fuller and warmer, because that is where people talk and wait. In meeting rooms you usually want nothing at all during the session and something during the break. Quiet workstations and phone booths belong empty. You put a separate source in each zone and run them all from the same dashboard.

It works on the equipment already in place

Sonos, Chromecast or ceiling speakers You do not have to replace anything. RadioMatic is a stream and it comes in on what you use now. If you have Sonos in the coffee corner, the stream plays on Sonos. If you have a Chromecast hanging off an amplifier, that works too. If there is a 100-volt system with ceiling speakers overhead, something many office buildings have had in place for years, the stream goes into that system through the line-in on the amplifier. A browser on a PC or a tablet is enough to start.

Floor zones stay as they are If your building already has zones per floor or per wing, you keep those zones. If you want something different on the second floor than at reception, you put a separate source there and run both under one account. With several buildings, every site has its own mood under the same dashboard. You hear back within one working day, and after that your station is live in under ten minutes.

What you can choose from today

Three well known suppliers Look for music for your office and you end up with Soundtrack, Synerplay and Tunify. Soundtrack has a Dutch page about music for offices. Synerplay and Tunify have a single offering that is the same for every sector.

You arrange the licence yourself With all three you are playing music by human creators. That means two extra bills, from Buma/Stemra and from Sena. On its own Dutch licensing page Soundtrack says itself that almost everything is included in the subscription, apart from the public performance licence. You apply for that yourself at Buma/Stemra and Sena. What that costs is set out above.