Musiceuticals: New market or just music vendor differentiator?

I've been wondering about what I think of as Musiceuticals(tm). Let's start at the obvious beginning. Pharmaceuticals make you feel better. More recently other "...ceuticals" arose. Nutraceuticals is one of the most famous (notorious?). According to Wikipedia:

Dr. Stephen DeFelice coined the term in 1989. The term has no regulatory definition, but it is commonly used in marketing. ... Nutraceuticals are sometimes called functional foods.

Ok, foods that make you feel better. Do things marketed as nutraceuticals actually affect how you feel? Few know. Fewer still rigorously ask.

Music. Ah, music. That's a very different kettle. Does anyone with even a passing fondness for even one sort of music question whether it can alter how we feel? The question is: how to harness the power.

Hmm. Power. Not a subtle segue, but it'll work. Like many new approaches, Musiceuticals has ancestors. There's Muzak, for example. That horrible elevator music-like set of frequencies that is supposed to energize and/or calm, but generally annoys. (To be fair, those Muzak scientists have apparently gotten pretty good at this stuff. But you can rarely tell from their output.) And there's marching bands. And there was that little flap about Republicans using Springsteen's "Born in the USA" as a theme song when he wasn't really a fan. And more recently, the Nike/iTunes PowerSong (from the Apple site):

From the Nike + iPod menu, you can set a PowerSong. When you want to hear this song during your workout, press and hold the center button for instant sonic motivation.

In all these examples except the last, someone tries to make you feel a certain way because they choose to do so. Sorry for the tired analogy, but the last example, the PowerSong, is like the Web 2.0 shift from website contents being company-driven (Apple.com, Walmart.com) to being user driven (YouTube, MySpace). For the first time, you store a personally-selected sound that is supposed to make you feel a certain way at a certain, personally-selected time.

Take the morsel of music affecting mindset, link it with personal choice, turn the approach upside down...and you have Musiceuticals. Hey, I love my playlists. They aren't going away. And sometimes I select by genre. Or artist. All these are right on my iPod screen. And yeah, they'll be on the Zune screen. We need another menu item. It may be "Emotion" or "Mindset". Maybe "Musiceutical." In any case, it will alter or maintain your feelings at will. Like a Pharmaceutical, it may not be successful in changing your state of mind without additional forms of "treatment." But it will be a drug of choice.

The only big challenge? What do you need to know to connect music to emotion? And that's a future entry...

Musiceuticals in a trademark of Dox O'Ryan, Doxspot, and the Doxspot owners.