In a treatment room and in a salon, music is rarely an event. It goes on in the morning with the lights and off in the evening with the computer. For a dozen hours nobody gives it a thought - which is exactly why it is worth thinking about it once, calmly, outside consulting hours.
This article is not about which music calms a patient down. We have written about choosing the repertoire separately, in our pieces on music in a medical waiting area and on matching background music to the age and needs of patients. Here we deal with the organisational side: where that music comes from, who is responsible for it and what to do so that the subject stops coming back every six months.
A doctor's room, a beauty room, a hairdressing salon and a waiting area share one feature that sets them apart from a restaurant. The music in them plays quietly, evenly and practically without a break. It is the background of a working day, and that follows different rules than the setting of a dinner.
- Music that patients and clients can hear counts as public playback regardless of whether it comes from a radio, a phone or a disc.
- The private account of the owner or of an employee is the most common and the least durable source of music in a treatment room.
- The waiting area and the treatment room have different acoustic jobs to do and usually need separate volume control.
- In a salon the client stays a long time, but it is the employee who hears the whole thing from opening to closing.
- Our repertoire is free of fees payable to collective management organisations.
- It is worth having it in writing where the music playing at your place comes from.
Eight hours that nobody actually decides about
In a restaurant somebody notices the music. In a treatment room it stops existing after a week: it becomes part of the furniture, like a lamp or a chair. That is the moment it stops being a decision and turns into a habit.
The usual scenario looks like this. A phone or a laptop at reception, the private account of the owner or of one of the staff, an application somebody installed once. It works faultlessly until that person goes on holiday, changes phone or leaves. Then it turns out nobody knows what is actually playing in the waiting area, or whose account it comes from.
There is a second side to the same situation. Music that patients and clients can hear counts as public playback rather than private listening. It does not depend on the device: what counts is the place in which the sound spreads. Public playback usually involves fees payable to collective management organisations such as ZAiKS or STOART. They collect remuneration on behalf of the creators who have joined them and registered their works with them. That is how the system works and what their role consists of.
The waiting area and the treatment room are two zones
Treating the whole place as one room with one loudspeaker is convenient but rarely good: the waiting area and the treatment room have different acoustic jobs to do.
In a waiting area silence has an unpleasant property: it sharpens everything that interrupts it. You hear the conversation at reception, you hear the telephone, you hear the door. People sit close to one another and say nothing, so every single sound becomes an event.
Music as an acoustic screen
In and around the treatment room, music performs a function that is rarely talked about: it masks. A patient waiting in the corridor should not be able to make out what the receptionist is saying into the handset, nor what is going on in the room next door. That is a matter of privacy, not of aesthetics. An even, undramatic background raises the sound level just enough for individual words to stop being intelligible. Recordings with large differences in loudness work worse here, because in the quiet passages the screen simply disappears.
In the treatment room itself some people prefer silence. Two independently controlled loudspeakers settle that problem once and for all.
A salon where the client sits for an hour and a half
A hairdresser, a beautician, a nail studio and a physiotherapy room share one more feature: the client stays a long time. At a table in a cafe somebody spends a quarter of an hour, at the hairdresser's often two hours. That is enough to hear the entire set from beginning to end and start it again.
The person most exposed, however, is not the client but the employee. A client comes in once every few weeks. An employee hears the same loop from opening to closing, five or six days a week. If the music in a salon starts to annoy anybody, it will be that person, and they will eventually turn it down to zero or swap it for something of their own. So the length of a set is worth calculating against a shift rather than against a visit.
The third place that is easy to forget is the counter and the reception desk. That is usually where the equipment stands and where the material for the client lies: the price list, the leaflet, the client loyalty cards used for recording visits. Since you are tidying that spot anyway, add the music carrier to it.
How to settle it once
The whole operation is a one-off and takes less time than putting it off has already taken.
- Name one person responsible - a specific role, not whoever happened to arrive first.
- Cut the music off from private accounts - the source should belong to the business, not to an employee.
- Separate the zones - waiting area, treatment room, back office, each with its own volume control.
- Put the carrier next to the equipment - a disc or a memory stick stays in place and plays even when the internet goes down.
- Write down where the music comes from - a single sheet in the folder with the business paperwork is enough.
The last point tends to be dismissed and is the simplest of all. It is worth having in writing what material plays at your place and what it allows. Such a paper is prepared once and does not age along with an employee's phone.
Set the volume in the morning, with the waiting area empty, then check it again during the busiest hours. A room full of people damps sound quite differently from an empty one, and most practices set the level at eight in the morning and never go back to it.
The back office carries further than you think
A radio in the staff room is rarely treated as music in the premises, and yet the door keeps opening, staff walk in and out, and a corridor carries sound. In a small practice the back office and the patient area are separated by one wall and one door.
The simplest approach is to treat the whole place as a single installation: the same source, different volume levels. That removes the situation where a quiet background plays in the waiting area while a news bulletin from another world comes through the door.
A repertoire you do not have to think about
The music we offer is free of fees payable to collective management organisations. It is made up of recordings by creators who belong to none of those organisations and have not registered their works with them, and we hold full rights to use those recordings. These are not random files off the internet of unknown origin, but specific recordings by specific people, with a documented history.
The carrier can be a CD disc or a memory stick. Either one sits next to the equipment and plays regardless of the internet connection. A disc can also be printed with your own mark, which makes sense in a chain of practices or in a salon that later hands it out to clients. We wrote about that in our piece on where a music disc with a logo works best. If you want to work out what would suit your place, write to us through the contact form.
Music in a treatment room and in a salon is exactly what it ought to be: invisible. The trouble is that invisible things are the easiest to overlook, until they start causing problems. One afternoon spent putting the source, the zones and the paperwork in order closes the subject for years.
