Overwhelmed

In the movie “Moscow On the Hudson,” Robin Williams plays a character who defects from cold war Soviet Union to the United States. The first time he walks into an American supermarket with thousands and thousands of products piled up as far as the eye can see, his head starts spinning, he hyperventilates, and passes out in the middle of the aisle.

This, I think, accurately describes the situation with our music choices today. Production music libraries love to talk about how many tracks of music they have available – we’re all guilty of it. But at what point is “too much” a bad thing?

An experiment on this idea was run not long ago. They put out a display of homemade jam at a gourmet food store. First they only put out two flavors. Then they added a whole bunch of other flavors to the choices. They discovered that many more purchases were made when there were fewer choices. When there are too many choices, it becomes too much work to choose, so people don’t.

In our industry, it would appear that the same principles apply. Options are good, but if there are too many options, there is the danger that you’ll spend too much time trying to make the decisions, and your workflow grinds to a halt.

With this notion firmly in mind, we here at Omnimusic have always focused on quality and usefulness, rather than quantity. Which is better, thousands of tracks to listen through to find the useful ones, or fewer that are more useful?

So the next time you find yourself passed out on the floor and buried in music, wander over to www.Omnimusic.com and try it out.

Or stay on the floor. It’s your choice…

-Dave Hab