The Challenge: Many users, One Speaker System

Most of us work in an open-plan office. There are many approaches to music in the workplace - complete silence, isolation-via-headphones, a musical dictator or the path of least resistance (mainstream commercial radio satisfying nobody). None of these solutions seem very palatable.

Enter Maestroo! Research shows that music promotes productivity, as long as you get a say in its selection. Maestroo plays the music you and your colleagues select, in a You and your colleagues queues music in a room. The queue will be ordered in a way that will feel fair to all. The sound will be streamed from Spotify via the Maestroo Player to your speakers.

How Maestroo selects music

Democratic Interactive Playlist

Maestroo plays all tracks that the logged-in users have actively selected in a good mix, that considers things like how long since your selections where played last. This way you never have to wait long for your songs even if someone before you has added the whole Spotify catalog to the playlist.

Automatic Crowd Pleaser

When there are no more actively selected tracks, Maestroo™ will put together the perfect playlist based on the logged-in users’ play history. Tracks played often and by multiple users will get to the top of the list quickly. If you are short of time, all you need to do is log in to get your music into the mix. When out of ideas, Maestroo gets creative and adds tracks based on how often they were played in connection to other tracks, creating themes across user histories.

Mental Sanity

Maestroo will not automatically add tracks that logged-in users don’t like. Use your voting power to assure Maestroo waits until you log out before playing that incessant summer hit from 1992. Also, to keep things fresh, Maestroo never automatically plays the same song more than once a week or the same artist more than once a day.

The science bit

We are not making this up. A number of studies have begun to explore the influence of music on well-being at work following evidence that music listening can enhance productivity and morale, and that people use music listening to manage their well-being in daily life.

One of these studies are Haake, A. B. (2010). Music listening in offices: Balancing internal needs and external considerations (Doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield) accessed from www.musicatwork.net