Don’t you just hate it?
There you are, about to tuck into a romantic dinner at that little French bistro, and no sooner is the bit of steak frites on your fork angling towards your mouth when the sound system in the place suddenly erupts into classic Nine Inch Nails. Or you are eating in a place where a Nails tune would be apropos and the radio station they are tuned into insists on broadcasting ICBC commercials every 15 minutes.
Ugh! Some restaurants just don’t get it that inappropriate musical backgrounds are as debilitating to the enjoyment of their food as bad service or the wrong side dishes. It’s like ketchup and ice cream or foie gras and Gatorade. I once lived next to a Latin restaurant in Toronto that played the same Gypsy Kings CD over and over, all day long, for over a year. I imagine that inside the restaurant it was too noisy for the customers or service staff to hear
what was being played, but the neighbours did'nt get that mercy. To this day I can’t listen to even one of the tracks on that compilation without screaming and running for the woods.
I guess from the restaurant point of view, keeping the music as fresh as the lettuce is just another thing to have to do. It can be a lot of extra work compiling and refreshing the appropriate playlists on an iPod, or expensive if you have to hire someone else to do it.
Well, here’s one solution that might help to end the crappy music in restaurants problem.
Musicovery is a digital radio program from France (mercifully they don’t play French pop tunes) that has assembled a new and highly visual way of browsing for hip music. You just log on to their website at
www.musicovery.com and a key box looking similar to a TV remote allows you to select music as to mood, genre and even time period. Looking for some sobbing-into-your-scotch, smoky ‘50s jazz, or drug hyper ‘80s punk rock? They got it and the tunes all show up on your computer screen as a DNA chain-like graphic interface. You can drag the music map around until you find an interesting artist. Then when you click on their name, the artist is repositioned to the centre of the map and the music starts playing, along with some nice visual effects.
Hooking the program to a computerized sound system would be good for restaurants because it allows one to make gradual adjustments in tempo – from calm to energetic and back again - which would be useful for matching the music to the ebbs and flows of the energy in the room during different time periods of the day.
As the selections are constantly updated, Musicovery works for the home entertainer as well. Tune into the world section and those in the know will wonder how little ol’ staid you happened to have that latest peppery groove by Sexteto Mayor in your collection.
Then again, if you are one of those people who knows exactly what you like and you like your music served on the rocks.
Scotch Vibe offers a version of music radio with playlists matched to the style of whiskey in your glass.
