Music has many benefits
The presence of music in the workplace has quite a history.
It was in 1911 that efficiency managers became interested when a discovery relating to music was made at an indoor bicycle race held at the old Madison Square Gardens in New York. A brass band was part of the entertainment, and statisticians clocking the race discovered that the average speeds of the cyclists shot up by about ten percent during the band's sets.
Around five years later, a commercial laundry in the US experimented with playing ragtime records. The laundry found that productivity increased dramatically when ironing was done in time to music.
Then in 1922, the Minneapolis post office tried playing records in its night sorting room and found that sorting errors fell. There were too many instances of the same general effect. Music can improve performance was the conclusion, and ever since those early days, there are countless examples of music being used in one-way or another in workplaces.
There is now plenty of evidence that indicates that music can enhance concentration and mental immersion. In 1993 researchers at the University of California found that college students who listened to Mozart’s Piano Sonata for ten minutes prior to taking a spatial IQ test, scored eight points higher than those who did not. The concept is that listening to music might somehow enhance the brain’s ability to perform abstract operations immediately thereafter. Today, this phenomenon is known as the Mozart effect.
To understand more fully the question of whether or not music has an effect upon performance in the workplace one must understand that music can and does have an effect (both positive and negative) upon the performance of anyone in any environment.
Many studies have been completed that highlight the effects of music. There have been many tests on laboratory animals, adults, children, and even agricultural crops and house-plants. These studies have provided for a general consensus that music, the right music at the right volume, can help people relax, focus more intently upon their tasks, absorb material and information at a higher rate, and be, in general, more productive.
The problem is, however, that what is and what is not conducive to work environments depends on many variables:
- The type of work being done,
- The personalities of the workers, and
- The level of flexibility offered by the employer in relation to the playing or listening to music.
Music is often used to create a more pleasant atmosphere for customers as well as for increasing employee productivity. No matter what the setting, in all workplaces, there is a copyright issue regarding the playing of music. Just as companies guard their trademarks, products and patents, songwriters own copyrighted musical works and seek lawful compensation when others use them.
When music is played in the workplace without the permission of copyright owners, songwriters are more or less short-changed. That's because under copyright law in most Western countries, those who compose music have the exclusive right of performing or playing that music in public. According to law, a public performance occurs when music is played at any place where a substantial number of persons outside a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered.