Here at JDA we usually like to have something playing in the background during office hours and the method of how we achieve that has sure evolved over the years. Back at our old office it was a boombox hooked up to the speaker system playing ONE CD AT A TIME. Yes. One. Hey, it was the late 90s! Then it evolved into a CD player that could play Mp3 files on a CD, so that expanded the length of time between CD changes, but it wasn’t until we were able to hook up a computer with our iTunes library that the background music of our work day really took off.
I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve spent over the years in the iTunes store, but let’s just say it was a lot. And all those countless hours converting CDs to digital files. But it was well worth it; pretty soon we had hundreds, then thousands, of songs at our disposal. Our current library stands at 9,267 songs, which is pretty impressive, BUT we’ve found that it still wasn’t quite enough. The problem is that not everyone’s tastes in the office were properly represented by those songs, since most of those songs were acquired by one person (me). Even though there were many places where all our tastes overlap (“Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey and “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-lot, just to name a couple of examples), there were still a lot of songs that only a few people (or one person) were into.
Our latest attempt to make our office music as egalitarian as possible involves the hugely popular music subscription service Spotify. Almost everyone had a Spotify account; why not have everyone make a work playlist and rotate the list every day? Seemed like a good idea to all, so we embarked upon our JDAify Project and so far it’s been a hit. It was a lot of work for some people who are not as familiar with Spotify to come up with at least 8 hours of music to cover the entire work day, but we all managed to put something together and it’s been interesting to see what comes up every day. The best part is these lists are updatable on the fly, making them kind of an ever-changing, evolving organism that reflects our personalities and moods.
Here are the top 5 songs for each playlist, as determined by the playlist’s creator (click to enlarge):
Does your office/workplace allow music to be played? If so, what’s usually blasting on your speakers?
- Stephanie Han
Stephanie is a Senior Art Director at JDA Inc, a graphic design firm that specializes in supporting companies' branding and retail efforts with a Unified Marketing approach. To learn more, click here.
Comments