With MuMa, users can turn their computer into a musical jukebox, storing thousands of music pieces, and organize them into easily manageable libraries. While it gives users a great deal more control over the music, since they put it into the system themselves, it also has its own drawbacks. “MuMa’s not cheap,” says Schwartz. “You’ve got to pay for the software, buy the music and pay the license. But it has no restrictions in terms of creativity.”

These systems, and others like them, are a huge improvement over the bare-bones alternative, which has employees using consumer devices like CD players or iPods in tough commercial conditions. “CD players get changed in restaurants all the time – grease is the #1 killer for a CD player,” Schwartz says. “They’re just not designed to be used 16 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Keeping track of places that need music, and new ways to deliver it, is one more way to keep moving in music supervision. In the case of music for business, these kinds of technologies allow music supervisors to handle the sounds, while employees in retail environments can focus on what they were hired to do. “We want to create positive associations with the products that we’re selling, and music is one of the ways that we do it,” Schwartz adds. “The most appropriate way is having the right style of music playing at the right time of day, and nothing beats having an appliance to do that.”

The Trusonic is one way Schwartz solves his clients’ music supervision problems. The system consists of a hardware box installed in their environment, which connects both to their sound system and to the company’s central server in California via high-speed Internet, where the music is delivered from. Store/restaurant/hotel owners using the system can easily interact with it via the intuitive online interface called Music Manager, which allows for convenient programmed play and song-selection features, daily modifications to schedules, and more. “It solves the physical transfer problem,” Schwartz says. “We don’t have to touch it. I can put it in a closet and know that at 7:00 every morning it’s going to come on, and it will play exactly what we want it to play at that time. Trusonic is a music delivery service – the delivery is where it shines and, in my eyes, sometimes the delivery outweighs the content itself.” Music supervisors at Trusonic in turn select and license the music for the playlists, which runs the gamut from classical to techno.