AEI Music introduces ProFusion - smart music for pubs
Who's got the best job? On the shortlist must be AEI Music's nine UK programmers who spend all day, every day, making party tapes.
These are perhaps the most sophisticated "party tapes" you can imagine, however. To begin with the programmers are assisted by a new piece of American software called Ovation which automatically classifies the 250,000 tracks in AEI's international music library according to 400 different categories.
This helps the programmer create non-stop music for pubs and bars which changes mood through the day and gives operators - and their customers - just what they want.
The "tape" is actually an MP3 recording that is stored on the hard drive of AEI's latest product, called ProFusion.
According to AEI marketing manager Alex Martin, the new system has an advantage over other hard drive systems in that it neither repeats the tracks in the same order, over and over again, nor selects them purely at random.
"Random tracks can sound awful when they are put together and repetition can be annoying - especially for the barstaff. This system can put together tracks that sound good next to each other, but you never hear them in the same order."
A programmer starts by tapping in the name of a song which fits the mood to be created, and Ovation comes up with matches.
The search can be refined to a mind-boggling degree. Tracks are not only classified according to country of origin, genre, temp and the position it reached in the charts. Ovation knows things like every instrument played - so you can have an evening of oboe music - and can weed out tracks with swearing, or maybe only the songs with strong swear words if your customers can cope with the occasional "dash it" from Eminem.
"This leaves the programmer with a big lump of music, all of which is relevant tunes," said Martin. "It might include songs they have never heard before themselves. They listen to it and build up the final playlist."
Profusion can download 400 continuous hours of music at a time. That's about 6,000 songs. Pubs can order off-the-shelf programmes of 40 hours at a time, but the big chains tend to sit alongside the programmer to make sure the choice is right for their particular retail brand. Both Scottish & Newcastle Retail and Whitbread have been involved in trials of the ProFusion system.
If the music is chart-based, AEI sends through updates every month and specially themed music can be pre-scheduled for events like St Patrick's Day. ProFusion can also play different music for up to four zones in the pub, so you can have dance music in one bar, chill-out sounds in another and maybe something for the staff room.
The tracks that are downloaded into the ProFusion box are scrambled so they can't be re-recorded like regular MP3.
In theory, pub staff never have to interfere with the system.
"You just switch on the machine and it runs 24-hours a day, 365 days a year forever," said Martin. "The silences are also scheduled in. You don't have to touch it at all, which means licensees and staff can get on with what they are supposed to be doing - serving customers."
