Opinion: We will never know what private struggle prompted a member of the public to begin asking questions of the Inland Revenue Department earlier this year. Was it a case of a battling business in a GST mess, a Working for Families matter? We can only surmise that the person spent what must have seemed a very long time waiting on the phone.
Thanks to IRD’s policy of publishing responses to requests under the Official Information Act that “may be of interest to the wider public”, we know that this citizen asked for two things: a list of the songs played to people on hold with IRD and an answer to the question: “How come the IRD still plays the same songs since, like, forever? Have yous eva thought about changin the beats that yous play when ppl ring up the IRD?”
IRD duly provided its playlist as of June 2023 – 70 songs, structured into nine groups, each group with a single title in bold at the top (“when a customer calls and enters a queue, the hold music will start with one of the songs in bold and continue through the list”).
And the customer had a point: the playlist was identical to one provided in response to a previous OIA request in December 2019. The most recent release appeared to be Hide Away, the sole New Zealand hit for American singer Daya, from 2016.
IRD put the stale beats down to “infrastructure” the department was “in the process of refreshing” to “allow for further flexibility and access to a wider pool of songs/artists in the near future”.
In response to my own subsequent OIA request, IRD clarified that a planned change from the Genesys Engage system to Genesys Cloud would allow for tracks to be refreshed more frequently, but “Inland Revenue has not yet created policies or procedures for how often music is to be refreshed”.
While the majority were works by New Zealand artists, 11 were not (though two of those featured vocals by Kimbra and Lorde, respectively). I asked IRD if there was a Kiwi music policy. “There is currently no policy regarding the selection of New Zealand or non-New Zealand music,” came the reply. “This part of your request is therefore refused under section 18(e) of the OIA, as the document alleged to contain the information does not exist.” Jeez, steady on.
What can be revealed is that IRD’s licence to use music on hold costs the department $1377.89 per month, plus GST, under a contract with One NZ (formerly Vodafone), which has been in place since “at least” July 1, 2007. One NZ in turn deals with the Hutt Valley company Cloud Digital Media, which licenses music for public performance from OneMusic NZ, the collecting agency representing rights holders.
The songs you hear were chosen by IRD’s voice and SMS channel management team – members of which may have since retired, for all I know – and those choices are reported to OneMusic and determine how royalties are distributed to composers and other rights holders. There are currently nearly 300 music-on-hold licences generating about $392,000 annually, so there’s a bit of money to go around.
There are some old beats that will never go away – it’s hard to imagine being on hold and not hearing Poi E, Sierra Leone and Welcome Home – but there will, when IRD finally upgrades its system, eventually be some newer tunes to distract us from our tax matters. My OIA response also dangled the prospect of longer playlists in future. Until that time comes, on the phone with IRD will continue to be perhaps the only place in New Zealand where it is not possible to hear LAB’s In the Air.
