Music for Small Businesses

I

f you spend any amount of time in an office, you know that the white noise buzz of the heating or air conditioning is not a sufficient distraction from the mundane tasks you might have to accomplish. Nowadays, thankfully, there are a few services out there that provide radio service to businesses, and we don't just mean Muzak, better known as "elevator music." But which ones are the best or most worth the money?

Services like Spotify and Rdio require more constant attention, making them less convenient for an office.

The most obvious choice is Pandora. With Pandora for Business, companies sign up for a DMX account (the company that manufactures the Pandora Player) and a Pandora account, and then purchase the player. The player connects to your existing sound system, and voila—the music everyone wants to hear in the office, shuffled together. This works best if your team has at least somewhat similar taste in music, but if not, no worries—maybe everyone can find a new artist they'd otherwise not hear. The subscription is $24.95 a month, and the player comes at a one-time fee of $74.95, and there's no long-term contract required. Overall, it's a pretty decent choice to have.

Another option is Sirius XM Radio. With subscription choices either monthly (starting at $14.49 per month) or yearly (starting at $199/year), Sirius allows you a different kind of radio. It's commercial-free music, but it also gives you the option to listen to comedy stations, as well as news, weather, and traffic updates. For a slightly larger office, this might be a good option as a broader radio station that changes from time to time might suit everyone better than just choosing a few artists and making a Pandora station from it.

Other pick-as-you-go music services like Rdio and Spotify are alright, but they probably aren't too great for an office, as music has to be consistently queued up in playlists or by artist/album, so it would likely take too long to make a playlist with enough variation to prevent everyone from getting sick of hearing the same 100 songs every week.

Turntable.fm is another service, but it's got the same issues as Rdio and Spotify of needing more constant attention.

Here at Web2Carz, we enjoy using Pandora (and as always, no, we were not paid to write that) because we've all got relatively similar tastes in music, and while our preferences don't overlap all the time, there's enough that we can all hear something we like.