A Private Public Performance ☎️

One reason why companies use boring hold music might come down to licensing concerns.

So, first off, I just want to thank everyone who has signed up for this newsletter that honestly I should have started doing years ago. The goal is to have fun with some absurdly detailed archives. If you are new to Tedium and want to dive in, we capture details like these twice a week.

But since I have you, I also want to point out that this is not cool and should not sit unchallenged. This is not a complain-about-Substack newsletter. But if Substack sucks, I’m going to call it out. OK, regular programming ahoy:

(Miryam León/Unsplash)

When you’re on hold, odds are that a few things are going through your mind. Among them: Why is this music so awful? Why does it sound so generic? And why don’t they just play the radio instead?

Well, there’s a reason for that. Modern hold music was discovered by a guy whose building had started to play music for customers after a wire touched a steel girder, essentially turning the building into a giant radio. So, for a time, when hold music became popular, people used the radio.

Eventually, though, the music royalties people realized that hold music could potentially be a moneymaking avenue, and that the audio from the radio station could still be copyrighted. From ASCAP’s page on royalty payments:

Yes. When you place a caller on hold and transmit music via your telephone lines, that is a public performance of the music. It is your responsibility to obtain permission to perform ASCAP songs from ASCAP or directly from the copyright owner. ASCAP represents tens of thousands of copyright owners and millions of songs and an ASCAP license will give you the right to perform them all.

In other words, when you’re waiting to get your insurance claim managed, you’re in a public performance, just like a concert. Sounds fun.

» Wanna learn more? Read up on the history of hold music and the entrepreneurs that got their hold music machine into the Smithsonian.