This is a great piece of music, but there's a time and a place.
Do you really want to be listening to an account of Oedipal murder - drenched in psychedelic guitars and sung in Jim Morrison's chilling baritone - as you collect your key and book your wake-up call?

What sort of subliminal message does this send to arriving guests? Especially those of us who remember The End as the soundtrack to that scene in Apocalypse Now in which the live cow gets chopped in half?

It's not that I don't like The End. I just don't want to listen to it when I'm checking into a hotel. Just as I don't necessarily want to listen to Kylie when I'm buying a shirt or REM when I'm choosing a book.

The other week I complained in this column about the ubiquity of TV screens in public places. But noise, it seems, is worse.
A report by the World Health Organisation last year said 3,000 people in Britain die annually from noise-related stress.

It's not only traffic, roadworks and planes - music is getting everywhere, and for those of us who love music, this is not a good thing.
A potentially great song can be devalued by repetition. You can't help thinking less of it when you hear it droning under the hiss of the espresso machine in Starbucks.

In an interview in The Times on Monday, the "acoustician" Julian Treasure says that, as urban life gets noisier, peace will become as precious a commodity as time, and businesses will have to respond.

But so far they're getting it wrong. Restaurant owners confuse noise with "buzz", and too many companies allow the staff to chose their own music - presumably there was a rogue Doors fan at that hotel.

Treasure says: "If there is a pile of rubbish in the corner of the restaurant, if you could see it or smell it, nobody would put up with it.

"But with noise, people feel they are being antsy if they complain."

Oldsters don't. Over lunch in my local pub recently, an elderly man on the next table asked if the music could be turned off.

He got the response you often get in pubs: "Sorry, sir, but it's not up to us; we have to do what the brewery tells us."

But as the population ages, the breweries might have to adapt.
An acknowledgement by breweries, retailers and restaurants that sometimes we prefer silence to noise would be welcome.

But some of Treasure's predictions for the future sound downright sinister. Hypersonic beams could be used to build individual sound pools in cars and houses, with man and wife, sitting side by side, listening to different music, watching different TV channels.
How romantic.

We've already seen how anti-social behaviour is being fought with anti-social means (the mosquito), and more of us are using iPods to block out other people's noise, while creating our own.

Sound technology is also increasingly likely to be used to sell us stuff. How can it not, when research shows supermarket customers spend 30 per cent more when the right music is playing in the aisles?

The future, then, is either more chaotically noisy or more manipulatively quiet than the world we live in now. Expect a boom in the earplug market.