1. CONSUMER CONNECT CONSUMER CONNECT
122 HOTELIER INDIA | SEPTEMBER 2016 | www.hotelierindia.com
pletely eliminates staff intervention: connect our terminal,
smaller than an Apple TV, to your audio system and to the
Internet and never touch it again. Connect and forget! Every-
thing is managed from our back-end in Mumbai across time
zones to clients around the world. Internet outages do not af-
fect operations because every terminal includes the OS, music
and schedule. Playlists are refreshed and updated remotely.
Give us some insights of how you work?
Music Curator follows around 200 specialised bloggers and
tastemakers and we have an international roster of experts
and researchers that we can rely on. This network feeds us
daily with information and new music that is then tagged con-
textually and added to our database.
Before adding music to a place we take a deep breath:
understand its history, architecture, the brand, its clientele,
the ebb and flow of guest movement, etc. You miss much
of Umaid Bhavan if you ignore that Ali Akbar Khan Saheb
was its court musician. Thereafter every track is carefully
ear-picked and each playlist becomes exclusive. Finally, we
test the acoustics and calibrate the audio system because
substandard installation of pricey hi-fi equipment is, unfortu-
nately, rather common!
Our work in the Falaknuma Palace has become a reference.
The building is the Eastern outpost of Ottoman architecture,
with a blend of Tudor and Venetian, and some Mughal flour-
Background music as a Brand Asset
Music branding has the power to turn the background music into a core asset of the
hotel. Mumbai-based start-up Music Curator stands at the cutting edge of this discipline,
explains its founder, Achille Forler, former MD of Universal Music Publishing
ishes; the founder’s wife was from a princely family on the
Bosphorus with Hungarian lineage. We illustrated musically
the rich and complex cultural and historical warp and woof
of this marquee destination, highlighting in the process the
neglected field of Ottoman court music.
Or just last week, as we sourced all recordings of Aman-
cio D’Silva – arguably the greatest Indian jazz guitarist but
sadly forgotten today (he died in 1996) – we learned that the
Maharani of Jaipur, Gayatri Devi, an ardent jazz lover herself,
had been his benefactor and gifted him his first professional
guitar, an expensive Gibson. As a fitting tribute to both, the
Rajput Room in the Rambagh Palace is now the only place in
the world where you can hear every day the genius of Aman-
cio D’Silva.
What has been your most challenging assignment to
date?
Adding the next track in the playlist will always remain the
most challenging act in the decisional process. And I don’t
say this in a flippant way. Not all carefully selected tracks in a
playlist mix well, one with the other, when shuffled random-
ly. This can be particularly embarrassing in a spa when the
guest is alone with the music: any sudden break in key or
tempo will disturb the quietude. We have recently developed
our own technique of ‘controlled randomness’ to avoid such
an occurrence.
Achille Forler, founder, Music
Curator
How can background music help brand differentiation?
Experience is what differentiates brands, and this is what cus-
tomers instinctively go for. A brand is made of several assets
and music is one of them. Neglecting your music asset is like
neglecting an interior design asset or an F&B asset. When a
brand fires on all cylinders, the stage is set for the best experi-
ence within the price-band in which the brand operates.
Why is background music becoming an important asset
for the hospitality industry?
A lot of evidence has been collected in the last 60 years to
show that background music impacts customers behaviour.
But research in the last 15 years has revolutionised our under-
standing of how music works: we have a musical brain that is
different from, and pre-dating, our verbal brain.
The traditional offer of genre-based background music only
discreetly masks unpleasant sounds – voices, ambient noise
– and, at its best, create a kind of emotional ‘feel good’ among
guests and staff. When music is curated in tune with the other
assets of your brand, it becomes the voice of your brand and
conveys emotionally your corporate identity. That cannot be
achieved with genre-based, one-size-fits-all playlists.
How then should background music be approached?
You have to know exactly what your brand stands for. When
we started out we were lucky to have as clients some excep-
tional GMs in charge of renovation or re-opening of acme
heritage properties like the Falaknuma Palace or the Umaid
Bhawan Palace, who devoted long hours working with us at
the conceptual stage of the musical identity of their properties
without ever interfering with our creativity.
When you work for timeless destinations like the Falak-
numa or Rambagh or Umaid Bhavan, the key is to crack each
property’s code while keeping a sonic commonality because
they belong to the same Group and the music must reflect
that. But when you work with a brand that has little to differen-
tiate it from its competitors, then the key is to create an origi-
nal sonic foundation that allows continual evolution because
in these businesses one year is a very long time; you must
constantly refresh your playlists to stay ahead of the curve.
What innovations does Music Curator bring?
We make music the best ‘value for money’ overhead in your
budget. Creativity is not a matter of declaration but verifica-
tion. However in our business creativity faces two techni-
cal challenges: we believe that we have addressed them in
unique ways.
One: how do you find the music relevant to your project
when no human being can memorise the incredible amount
of music available? Over the last eight years, we have built a
unique and growing musical database that exceeds now two
million compositions, all ear-picked for their quality and suit-
ability and tagged with “contextual” keywords. Context is cru-
cial: you don’t play the same music when the ceiling is high or
low, when the walls are made of wood or of glass and steel, for
breakfast or lunch, in the gym or around the pool, facing the
sea or the city skyline, during busy hours or down time, etc.
Our contextual musical resource is unparalleled in the world.
Two: having built the playlist, the next challenge is to de-
liver it to the client and ensure that the right music is played
at the right time. CDs, iPods, apps have shortcomings and are
prone to mishandling by your staff. So we have developed a
secure, industrial-grade hi-fi music delivery system that com-
BY PRIYA PUDUMJEE
Happily ever after.
Make your kitchen life a fairy tale, putting
a magic wand in your hands to get any
recipe you want, cooked the way you want.
To know more about novelties
for hotels, contact us:
email: eprindia@electrolux.com
phone: +91 9643305245