BGMs

Music

Nobody should have to be the office music person. BGMs turns one speaker into a shared queue your team adds to from their own phones. Free, nothing to install, no account to listen.

## The office music problem is a person, not a playlist Every office that plays music has one person who plays it. They own the aux cord, their account is logged in, their taste is the room's taste. When they are out sick, on leave, or gone from the company, the music stops. When they are in, nobody else quite feels free to skip a track. BGMs removes that person from the job. ## How it works 1. **One browser becomes the player.** Open `bgms.live` on whatever machine is wired to the speaker and leave it there. That is the whole setup. 2. **Everyone else uses their phone.** Open `remote.bgms.live`, search, and drop a song into the same queue from their own desk. Nothing to install. 3. **The queue sorts itself out.** Every track has an up and down vote. Enough downvotes and a song leaves on its own, so nobody has to be the one who kills it mid-play. ## Why it stays on The queue is the only thing that has to survive, and it does. A month in, the room has a shared history of what it listens to on Monday mornings and what it listens to at 5pm, and none of it lives in one person's account. New hires scan the QR code on the wall and are part of it in ten seconds. It also works when the office is half empty. Someone working from home can open the remote and change what is playing on the office speaker, which is a strange and specific kind of presence that no other team tool gives you. ## Beyond the office Anywhere more than one person shares a speaker: coworking floors and cafes that put a QR code on the counter, studios and shops that need music running all day, parties where people add from the couch instead of crowding a laptop. ## How long this has been running We built it for our own office because a silent office was unbearable, used it internally for five years before releasing it publicly in 2021, and it has been on our speaker every working day since. Free to use at `bgms.live`.