What's the best strategy for team room music?

Members of my team often dislike the music taste of others. All they can agree on for a while is radio, but all are kinda dissatisfied by that. And there are members who can't concentrate at all when there's music. Headphones for everyone? Any other idea? (no, not put them in different rooms, b/c they're supposed to be a team!)

From stackoverflow

• A jukebox server with music choosen by the entire team.

  friol : Why downvote? This is democratic... and you know, music makes smarter, scientists proved it :)

  Blorgbeard : Well, probably because the question says the team can't agree on music , and your solution is.. have them agree on music!

• Headphones. Probably the cheapest and most effective solution.

• Um, headphones. No worrying about telephones, lyrical content (just as a visitor walks past), etc.

• Definitely headphones. Then if you need to get someone's attention, you have IM. If your company is buying them for everyone make sure they don't get shoddy quality headphones. I was at a company that provided some cheap headphones and I quickly replaced them with my own because the quality sucked.

  OregonGhost : +1 for mentioning IM and that the company should buy high quality headphones.

  Paul Nathan : There's also the option of running an IRC server where devs idle in the chatroom.

  Steven A. Lowe : ya might as well be coding from home

• Really, headphones is the only proper solution, and they really aren't such a bad one. With a little bit of cash and know-how you can get yourself some very crisp and clear headphones.

  I know myself that I hate listening to other people's music, sometimes I don't feel like listening to music at all, so being an ass and playing any kind of music to a developer that doesn't want it is a huge kick in the balls for productivity imo.

  itsmatt : Totally agree. I get distracted by anything with words - or just office chit-chat so I tend to live with headphones on when I'm designing or coding.

  Blorgbeard : Me too. I recommend Koss KSC75s - cheap, excellent sound quality, and I can wear them for hours at a time without them becoming uncomfortable.

  Steven A. Lowe : headphones and a team room is silly!

  Paul Hammond : I agree with Steven Lowe - one of the main benefits of having a team room is to promote sharing and participation. I *hate hate hate* entering a room and seeing a bunch of individuals in their own little worlds.

  Kibbee : However, as Spolsky has pointed out, sometimes it's nice to be able to close your office door and get some work done without the distractions of others. If there are 3 people in a room, and 2 are having a conversation that doesn't apply to the third person, what is the third person supposed to do?

  Jon Tackabury : Headphones FTW. It's not a damned party, you're coding. Sometimes you don't want to listen to someone else's music and you'll never, ever all agree on what to listen to.

  mattwynne : How can you be part of a team if you're locked in your own little headphones world?

  RodgerB : How can you work when your locked in your own room with distraction? Some people develop better under the influence of music, this is what this question is about isn't it?

  Mitch Wheat : I agree with all those who pointed out the sillyness of a 'team' room full of people wearing headphones!

  : Being a team doesn't mean you have to like the music other like.

  Robert Paulson : while I like my own music, nothing says don't talk to me like donning a pair of headphones. Worse yet are noise canceling headphones. Wonderful tech, but at least wear crappy headphones that let you hear other people when they try to talk to you.

  Mitch Wheat : I think it's evidence that SO is failing to live up to it's goals when a question which is does not directly have anything to do with programming spawns an answer that gets 35 upvotes!

• Um...not to seem dense, but...what is the point of a "Team Room" if everyone in it is isolated unto themselves with headphones?

  Mitch Wheat : +1 for your common sense!

  Mark Renouf : Totally agree. This happens frequently with our small group and it's frustrating. Very isolated and leads to lots of solo work.

• Metal. All the time.

  Michael Easter : LOL -- very nice but no up vote

  Sherm Pendley : Damn right! If it's too loud, you're too old. :-) (Up voted for humor.)

  RodgerB : Completely agree.

  Thomas Owens : HammerFall! HammerFall! Yeah.

  Sergio Acosta : LOL - I pictured a room full of programmers focused on their code but banging their heads furiously at the same rhythm.

• Headphones

• One thing I have seen work well is to have time slots and have each team member own the choices for their time slot. That could be music or silence. Their choice. This seems to work for most situations. And sometimes you might just get exposed to music that you wouldn't have otherwise heard... :-)

  But this is about the larger subject of team dynamics. People DON'T agree all the time, and this is just another team norm you all need to decide upon together. Unfortunately, with most team norms, they won't suit everybody all of the time. As long as you have a team norm that makes each person happy a balanced and fair amount of the time, that is the best you can ask for.

• Here’s the “rules” we use in the patterns & practices team rooms:

  • Music rotates each hour
  • Everyone gets an hour to play the music they want
  • At the end of the hour someone else gets the next hour
  • At any point anyone can say “next” and the current song gets skipped
  • You cannot say “next” repeatedly

  Other options include letting Pandora pick for you or playing KEXP, probably the best radio station going.

  I’ve only seen this really break down once and what can I say… some really bad folk rock was involved and Bob and I had been having a rough day with some code. So Sorry.

  : That can only work if your musical tastes are similar. Also, who wants to listen to music all day?

• In my team I dictate the music, which is Fip Radio all day (http://www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/fip/endirect/), because it's the only radio that's unobstrusive enough to let you do some work, and that is eclectic enough (ACDC, Bach, Muse, Keith Jarrett, Archive, they can put all this in the same hour) to please most....

  Everyone has headphones but at the end of the day we enjoy the feeling of working to the same tune (and it's quite important to be able to speak at people without shouting because of the headphones)

• Get everyone on the team to name their 5 favourite musicians/artists, then go to Last.fm, Yahoo Music, Pandora or whatever and create a radio station that plays music by those artists in random order. That way everyone's happy, everyone gets to know some new bands, no one can complain that they're being forced to listen to crap since others are going through the same thing, and you build the team by creating a common discussion point ("Rahul's music taste is atrocious, I wish he would just leave"). :-)

• A pair of good noise-cancelling headphones

• Silence?

  And there are members who can't concentrate at all when there's music
  What other choice is there?

  It's always good taste.
  It's easy to talk over.
  It adds a professional ambiance.
  Stereo's for silence are much cheaper than stereo's for music.
  There are so many great artists to choose from this genre, like Harpo Marx's greatest vocal hits, Marcelle Marceau singing the real Silent Night or R2D2 Unplugged.

  Ed Guiness : LOL. I guess you've never worked with an overweight farting machine who grunts with every breath and grunts extra hard with every movement? You'd soon beg for piped death metal...

  Andrew Grimm : What? No mention of John Cage's 4'33"? That's a classic!

• I think that headphones are the only proper solution because some people are distracted by music and some people are aggravated by certain songs or music that doesn't fit their current mood.

  For example, I listen to different stuff when I'm coding, refactoring, or debugging. The wrong music can throw me off.

  If you let people be DJs for the others, you're going to run into problems. One person would like rap with offensive lyrics. Another person would listen to Christian rock and offend everyone. Another person would be into Christmas music as early as Halloween, while others prefer to listen to talk radio.

• Noise canceling headphones. I picked up a pair of Sony's for about $40 that I personally think work as well as more expensive ones. The problem is that some people like to code in absolute silence - and I even knew a developer who worked to nothing in her headphones other than a recording loop of white noise.

  Team building activities are great, when they don't impose on people in a way that can potentially compromise the quality of their work. I listen to progressive metal and old-school punk on a regular basis. One of my developers only listens to jazz. Another listens to hip-hop. And yet another listens to something in a language that I have never even heard before. Sometimes diversity is good and should be maintained - music is culture and a form of self-expression. Focus on integrating good habits and lessons that can be learned from, but don't try to turn everyone into a cookie-cutter representation of each other. At least that is my opinion. :-)

• I believe the correct answer is "it depends". If it is not a small team (3-4 people), the only obvious answer is headphones.

  If the team's musical tastes are generally aligned, then maybe all that is needed is to take turns playing CDs (or iPods or whatever). There is definitely a community/team-building effect to everyone enjoying the same music together. Another alternative would be to use something like Ampache using the "democratic" mode. The caveat to all of this is that any can, at any time, turn the music off until further notice if it is needed.

• Put them in different rooms.

  Concentration is much more important than an "I-read-a-book-on-Agile-once" idea about how to organize a team.

• I had a chance working in a team which played music open air. It was horrible. Our music tastes were orthogonal and it was a pain listening to something that you truly hate.

  Decent headphones is the only real strategy.

• Absolutely no "team" music. Headphones are the way to go. They are still a team, even if they are wearing headphones. The best way to do it is give everyone their own office with a door and great big windows. Then they can go ahead and play whatever they want!

  If they want to chat with each other, they will. You could leverage MSN Messenger or just let them send emails around. Whatever works for that team. You don't want to implement an environment which hinders productivity.

• Obviously headphones. Getting everyone to agree on one kind of music, or even getting everyone to agree on listening to music at all is out of the question. Personnally, I sometimes needs to listen to music to work better while other time I need to listen at nothing at all and can't concentrate with music on.