How similarly colleagues perceived each other in regard to their musical passions seemed to influence the intensity of conversations about shared music as well as the intimacy of their relationships. Twenty-eight (97%) of the survey participants strongly agreed with the statement ‘the more similar colleagues perceive each other in their musical passions; the more likely they have in-depth conversations on shared music and come closer to each other’. The results from the interviews seem to confirm this
impression:
I3: The more I have in common with a colleague in terms of the music we share the deeper are our conversations on shared music and there is this guy and we became very good friends over the last couple of years and I think that was mainly at least in the beginning because we really like to share the same music. I5: Of course I can somehow better relate to those who share the same kind of music and also like to talk to them more than to others who share different music. My friends at work often seem to have similar music tastes as I have. In brief conversations that did not require the conversation partners to have similar music taste, colleagues simply expressed likes and dislikes about shared music and briefly discussed shared music in respect to colleagues’ working activities and the working environment:
S6: We briefly talk about if they particularly like it or if they don’t particularly like it and you can talk like this with everyone, you don’t need to share similar music interests with them.
I4: We have conversations around look we need to keep the volume down, because people gotta talk on the phone or gonna have a meeting, but you know it doesn’t matter what kind of music you like in this conversation.
Intense conversations appeared when colleagues tried to find out more about each others’ music and also used shared music as a starting point for conversations on other personal issues. Such conversations were often triggered by a colleague’s questions about someone else’s music:
I5: You know when you are interested in someone else’s music because you kind of think that this person might like the same kind of music as you do you usually start a conversation by asking “Who is this you’re playing. I don’t think I have heard this album.” Like saying “Is this The Cure?” And then you can start to talk about all sorts of things.
Giving background information in response to such questions and exchanging
knowledge about shared music appeared to be enjoyed by the participants. Sometimes colleagues even challenged each other’s knowledge about shared music:
I2: You sometimes kind of play the knowledge game with people and challenge each other in conversations about music.
The way the participants talked to their colleagues about shared music seemed to be connected to the intimacy in their relationships with their colleagues. There appeared to be colleagues who hardly ever really talked about music with each other and only did so in relation to the work they were doing. Two interview participants described this form of relationship at work:
I5: It is like with those guys I don’t really have common taste in the music we share and I also don’t consider myself as a friend to them. We mostly just briefly talk about music if there is some music which needs to fit into a design concept.
I3: I mean there are some colleagues who share quite different music and I somewhat also don’t really talk about music with them except if it has something to do with music and the work we are doing. I never really do something outside the workplace with those either, because we are not really close to each other.
Another, more intimate, form of relationship between colleagues was indicated in the following statement:
I2: We can sometimes talk for days about a music topic when one of us brought some new music to work, you know we are passionate about the same kind of music, but somehow we have a very different lifestyle and never really do much outside the workplace together.
Moreover, a third type of relationship between colleagues, which was characterised by even more intimacy, seemed to exist. Two of the interview participants explicitly described how music sharing helped to establish friendships with colleagues:
I1: We weren’t friends before when we began working together. Quite quickly we realised that we were both interested in similar types of music through the music we were sharing and quite quickly we started to talk about the music and then about everything else and so that helped to develop our friendship and sustain it a long way.
I3: We came together through the music we kind of shared. You know there was just so much music we had in common and over the years I think music became a real cornerstone of our friendship. I mean it is just so great because we can visit concerts together or often also listen to music together outside the workplace.