With the cor­rect choice of music and by giv­ing the per­cep­tion of progress cus­tomers on-hold in a tele­phone queue under­es­ti­mate the time they have been kept wait­ing and will stay on the line longer before hang­ing up.

Newsweek sum­marises a num­ber of research stud­ies that have looked at the psy­chol­ogy behind tele­phone queues and on-hold music, not­ing the dif­fer­ent reac­tions cus­tomers have when con­fronted with hold music, recorded apolo­gies or esti­mated wait times.

Though it hardly seems pos­si­ble that the Muzak (the term is often used gener­i­cally, but Muzak Hold­ings LLC is a real com­pany) pumped into malls could actu­ally influ­ence shop­pers, the truth is, alas, that it does. James Kel­laris, a mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Cincin­nati, says that music can have an impact on a wide array of cus­tomers’ behav­iors, chang­ing their per­cep­tion of time, con­di­tion­ing them to asso­ciate a song with a brand, or lim­it­ing their abil­ity to crit­i­cally ana­lyze a poten­tial pur­chase due to musi­cal dis­trac­tion. “When shop­pers are exposed to music in a store, sales resis­tance decreases,” he says via e-mail. Our brains have a finite band­width for tak­ing in and pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion, and clog­ging that band­width with music is some­times enough to pre­vent us from mak­ing ratio­nal pur­chas­ing deci­sions, or wor­ry­ing about the time.

The arti­cle also notes how we have the rather excel­lent Erik Satie to thank for the muzak phenomenon:

[Satie] devel­oped a very cyn­i­cal atti­tude toward the lis­tener. Satie was so obsessed with the idea that music could no longer com­mu­ni­cate to the audi­ence, he con­cluded that music in the 20th cen­tury was des­tined to be a vac­u­ous, com­fort­able appa­ra­tus best used as a back­ground for other activ­i­ties, much like a favorite chair.

via Mind Hacks