How We Design Music for Business
The following post was contributed by Joel Oltyan, a DMX music designer.
There is a process for designing music for businesses. A lot of it comes from how the businesses view themselves. We take into consideration the physical parts of the puzzle – the store’s décor or the clothing line or atmosphere of a restaurant and their actual target customer. We look at how they view themselves and what their company portrays. We interview them, listening to how they describe their company philosophy, how they describe their products and services.
Designing a signature sound for a business is more of a kind of feeling of what you’re trying to create. Demographics can come into play, sometimes they don’t. For example, I don’t want to say cliches, but if the customer has a spa, the type of music is kind of a given. Then we have somebody like Abercrombie & Fitch and that’s a completely different thing. Demographics comes into play when say, a retailer describes the business as “sexy.” Does that mean sexy to a 20 years old woman or a 40 year old man? That’s when demographics becomes more important.
Most businesses have a tempo in mind, telling us they want the music to be upbeat or they want a cool, relaxed atmosphere. A lot of times when we get to the situation of creating a signature program for someone, they’re wanting to mix genres and tempos, and that’s why they come to us to create their own sound. They want upbeat but they don’t want people to get into a frenzy or they want to be relaxing, but they don’t want to put people to sleep. A good mixture will generally err on the side of up tempo, or err on the side of down tempo.
We definitely do our research. We go to the stores, hang out in the store, sometimes talking to customers and employees. We also visit the stores that our customers tell us are their competitors and get that atmosphere. We do a really good job of preparing and studying and learning about the customer. Because of that, we’re able to create signature sounds for companies to serve them and their customers.
Related posts:
- The Common Design
- The Design Process
- The Design Process
- Give Them the Time of Day
- The Evolution of the Victoria’s Secret Sound
Learn more about DMX Services.
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Creating a signature sound is really important in establishing an identity. It’s a good thing you guys do research in order to find out what would help create that identity to suit your customers ideas when figuring out the tempo and what people would like in certain types of establishments.
Comment by Amanda Rose — September 25, 2009 @ 1:51 pm
It’s very cutting edge to be able to have a signature sound these days when owning a business. It’s always good to at least get help I’ve found too, as it’s very hard to know exactly what will appeal to demographics, especially if you might have more than one to serve. Professionals make that task so much easier.
Comment by Vanessa — September 28, 2009 @ 4:42 am
It’s really hard to pick the tempo people desire sometimes as not everyone who owns a business is into what their demographic listens to. It’s nice to have a programmer that is able to design a music program that suits whatever needs I have. It’s nice that after that the signature sound has been discovered.
Comment by DIno — September 28, 2009 @ 5:10 am
i luv dmx am a fan
Comment by orion — June 7, 2010 @ 5:48 am