Feature: Ben Bridgewater

BB: It was all pretty serendipitous if I think back. I'd never really known what it was that I wanted to do, but had always been obsessed with music. I was mesmerised by radios when I was a toddler. We had a little brass horn lying about the house too, and the school I went to at seven was very musical so I gravitated towards the trumpet because I wanted to be able to make a proper noise with it. Next came vinyl. I was shy to listen to music when I was little and didn't have much knowledge of it apart from what my parents played (my mother was a 60s It girl of sorts, had something to do with Radio Caroline and appeared on a show called Jukebox Jury), but then one of my sister's boyfriends gave me a mixtape and I was off, buying records. Mainly hip hop to begin with, but 90s hip hop is a gateway to music in general because of what they were sampling and I amassed a collection as my knowledge and interest grew. Still I had no idea what this would lead to, and whilst a DJ career bubbled in the background I tried my hand at a variety of jobs, one of which was working for a small company called MusicGuru, which loaded up people's iPods for them. In my DJing life I had crossed paths with my now business partner, Dan Lywood, numerous times. He was an older hand, and higher ranking in that world. Then we bumped into each other in a farmer’s market in Queens Park. The weeks preceding this I'd had the seed of an idea but not the confidence to do it on my own, so the day after bumping into Dan I called him, and the rest is history. It turned out Dan had already been doing something similar for Schrager Hotels, so we had a head start, and our first customers were Quo Vadis and Chiltern Firehouse. Our combined contacts and knowledge meant that the sum of our parts was greater than the whole, and we were soon juggling DJing with an emerging business.

BB: Those first heady days/years meant a LOT of DJing. It helped to be out and about, to be seen and heard, but it meant we were often skipping mornings and leaving early to prep for gigs. It was a false economy too, because we were bolstering our business which was supposed to be about playlisting with money from DJing. But it was addictive - we used to get all the gigs, from the Brits afterparties to the Bond and Star Wars premiers, parties in Positano, Sao Paulo, all over. However, DJing is not conducive to normal life, and gradually the ratio changed from 50/50 DJing/Playlister, to now, when I rarely DJ at all. It's also wasn't realistic for me to maintain in a fickle and fast moving world where everyone is a DJ, especially as a man when the DJ world was turning away from needing to be strong in order to lug vinyl about, to a digital age, allowing all of the talented female DJs to emerge. I jumped before I was pushed, and hung up my headphones, now only going out for love or money, or a great travel opportunity!

BB: 16 all heads counted, with 10 of us on music and offices in London, Sydney and Ibiza. When it comes to hiring, that word serendipity comes up again - all of our staff seem to have found us somehow, and seemingly all at the right time, through introductions, recommendations, or in one case a chance meeting. It's almost impossible to recruit, and if we were to have taken the route of advertising in Music Week for people who 'like music', it probably would've taken the same amount of time to find the good ones. Curating music is a very different skillset to just making a playlist or simply liking music. You need to have a deep knowledge of music, an understanding of hospitality, an intuition for your target audience and a lack of ego. One of the first things people want to do is put all of their favourite tunes in a collection for a client, but that's not what it's about. We are not here to educate people, we are here to find a route to what it is that they like, and to deliver a collection based around that with enough breadth in it to be able to update with fresh content on a monthly basis, taking personal taste out of the picture whilst using your ear to determine whether or not the track is suitable and good. We are a service industry after all.

BB: Haha, it's not what you'd imagine at all.. yes we do have an office, and whilst a lot of the team work remotely on and off, they all spend time in it as part of their jobs, but it's headphone city! Everyone is in cans (headphones) the whole time. We have to break to play music, and the non-music team always express a huge amount of joy when actual music is played. One of the pitfalls of the job is the needle-drop nature of it - when you are shopping for vinyl there are lots of other people waiting, so you get your stack of records and have to go through them quickly, dropping the needle down for a few seconds at a time to ascertain whether or not you're going to buy it - record shop etiquette. In the office, due to the volume of music we're processing, it's the same - you can't spend too much time on a tune even if you love it, you just have to save it for later. Oh the luxury of listening to a whole tune from start to finish!

BB: Hmm.. let's just say some clients are more generous than others. It's invaluable to spend time in a location we're doing the music for, but most of our clients have an idea what the competitors are charging, so don't necessarily see the value of us drinking their cocktails for free. As I kind of touched on before, the depth of knowledge and understanding of our field now means we can get a pretty good start from never having set foot in a venue, and with 600+ it's pretty hard to. However, there are still plenty of opportunities, and it's a massive luxury to always be able to get tables in the likes of J Sheekey's or Riad El Fenn in Marrakech.

BB: In short, yes. Some groups will share identities across common areas like lobbies, but generally every place is different. That said, there is only so much 'good' or suitable for background music out there, so the main focus of the music team is cataloging and preparing it, predicting trends and researching new releases.

BB: Technical answer: taking an average song length of 3 minutes and the average operational hours of say, a hotel restaurant of 18 hours, you would need 360 tracks in order for there not to be repetitions over the course of one day. Over a 30 day period, you would need 10,800 tracks in order to have no repetitions at all. This is not realistic of course, and we have to reach a happy medium between suitability/availability of music, vs customer dwell time vs staff patience. With our music being delivered on shuffle, it's not like the songs play in the same order, which brings the number down again. If you were to achieve one track playing 5 times over the course of that month, you'd need 2,160 tracks. Our competitors usually work on 800 to 1,200 tracks, updating 50 or so per month, but we have our own system of revolving collections, which we start off at a size of 2,500 on average, moving around and refreshing about 500 per month. You get way more with us!