Never thought of this before:
Mood Media provides tunes (as well as smells from a 1,500-strong scent library) to over 300,000 American commercial locations. Family-friendly shops tend to shun raunchy Christmas lyrics such as Lady Gaga’s “Take off my stockings; we’re/ Out spreading Christmas cheer.” Mood Media offers “retail-appropriate”, non-explicit Christmas songs; that includes hip-hop tracks, such as “Toy Jackpot” by Blackalicious and “Christmas in Harlem” by Kanye West (“Won’t you come sit on my knee?/ And tell me everything that you want/’Cause, baby, I’m your Santa Claus”)
The segmentation of Christmas partly reflects the science that now goes into selling to smartphone-toting consumers, who are at once better-informed and more distracted as they shop. Retailers use “dayparting” to target music to such different audiences as daytime mothers or after-school teens. Restaurants use high-tempo songs to make lunch-time clients eat fast, and slow tunes to persuade evening diners to linger (and run up bar bills longer than a six-year-old’s letter to Santa)...
Read
more in the Economist.
(Thanks, Tom)
