You are lodged in an hotel, no matter of how many stars, and have your breakfast there. Or else you have your meal in a restaurant or have a drink in a bar. It is the same everywhere: some music is being played, most often background music, but not too seldom foreground music. Or at any rate it is some noise that pretends to be music.

One of the first duties of the person who opens the bar, the restaurant or the hotel breakfast room is to press the button which starts the background music. This typically implies switching on a certain radio or TV program, so that the music played is not actually chosen by the waiter in question but instead by the moderator of the program. Much more rarely, it is some sound source deliberately chosen by the person declared responsible for this service by the owner of the restaurant. The type of music played may reflect the taste of the person who starts it off; otherwise, it at least appears tolerable to that person.

There is some variation in restaurant music. Sometimes it is shapeless esoteric droning. Sometimes it is a sequence of current hits of pop music. Sometimes a male voice scans a text, the only structure being a rhythm which reduces to somebody else beating the tact. In no case does the sound have any esthetic or spiritual or intellectual or emotional – you name it – value. This is because certain kinds of music – world folklore, jazz, pop oldies, classical music etc. – are never played.

A few elementary statistical relations are relevant in this context:

1. The job of a restaurant waiter, bar keeper, hotel breakfast attendant or whoever starts the background music does not presuppose a high level of education. It is typically an early step in a career, mostly occupied by relatively young people without much formal training and cultural background.
2. People who pay for their role as guests in a hotel, a bar or a restaurant may be of any age, but at any rate include an above-average portion of members of the upper age groups and social classes.
3. Overlap in the musical taste of social groups #1 and #2 is minimal. The group of elderly and well-to-do hotel and restaurant guests typically prefers just that kind of music mentioned last which is never played in restaurants.

Net balance: The owners of those restaurants and bars and the managers of those hotels never spend a thought on what would be an agreeable offer for their guests. They couldn't care less whether their guests feel well in the ambience provided. They do not see those bar and restaurant visitors who turn on their heels in the entrance once they hear the background music. The victims are the hotel guests with breakfast included. Probably the managers' interest is in their spending as little time as possible at the breakfast buffet.