In 1980, a young musician named Janet Marlow made her entrance as a classically-trained guitarist at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City.
A fifth generation musician, she’d been studying the 10-string guitar under the tutelage of Spanish virtuosos. She practiced six-to-eight hours per day to prepare for the performance, where a sold-out crowd of classical music patrons, artists, and critics expected mastery.
She won them over. Afterward, her manager booked gigs across the country. Marlow was on her way to a steady career as a guitarist.
Decades later, however, she spends her time catering to a far different — but perhaps no less discerning — audience. She is a leading music composer for pets and the owner of a company called Pet Acoustics.
A poster from Marlow’s Carnegie Recital Hall performance. (Courtesy of Janet Marlow)
Marlow’s company sells products equipped with music that she’s designed to relax dogs, cats, rabbits, and horses. She’s been featured on Martha Stewart and CNBC, and has capitalized on Americans’ seemingly endless pet budget.
And the whole idea came from somebody who never even had pets growing up.
A discovery in Connecticut
Marlow was a classic New York City arts kid — the kind, she says, who always knew “what art is showing at the Metropolitan.” Her father worked as principal violist of the American Ballet Theater.
Family tradition dictated that she learn the piano. From there Marlow tried the violin before falling in love with the guitar as a teenager. At the Mannes School of Music, she met an innovator of the 10-string guitar, Narciso Yepes, who told her to visit Spain and study with him.
“I wrote to him, and I never heard from him,” Marlow says. “I went anyway.”
She found Yepes after he returned from a tour and spent the next five years off-and-on in Spain, learning from him and Andrés Segovia, another famous guitarist, before jumpstarting her career at Carnegie Recital Hall and going on tour.
“But not too many years after that, I left New York and started my life over again,” Marlow says.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
She moved to Connecticut, where musician Paul Winter had an artist farm. Away from the congestion of the city, Marlow adopted a black-and-white cat and called him Osborn, the name of the street where she had a home.
Osborn would almost always come to her side when she practiced her 10-string guitar.
“I became fascinated with, ‘What is it about animal hearing that makes music such a profound relaxation for them?’” Marlow says.
Making music into a business
She researched scholarly articles, discovering that because dogs and cats can hear a much wider spectrum of sounds than humans their musical tastes likely differed considerably. Anything with the mixture of frequencies in a Beethoven symphony would be too extreme. Words aren’t even ideal.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
So she set out making classical music with a smooth, steady frequency — with instruments like the guitar, violin, harp, and flute — that eliminates the variances that can spook pets.
“All the things that I know that goes into music or stimulating behavior in a human, it had to be the opposite for animals,” says Marlow, who adds that the music is mostly helpful as a calming tool for situations like thunderstorms, fireworks, or taking a cat in a car.
In the late 1990s, she released a CD with music for cats and dogs. For the next few years, Marlow worked part-time on composing pet music while still touring as a 10-string guitar musician.
An early release of dog and cat music from Marlow. (Courtesy of Janet Marlow)
In the late 2000s, she went full-time into business, launching Pet Acoustics with a partner. (She eventually took over as the sole owner.)
Marlow marketed by attending trade shows, meeting pet store owners, releasing a book called Zen Dog that got into Barnes & Noble, and sharing her music with veterinarians.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” she says. “But I know people and, as a performer, knew how to communicate.”
Pet Acoustics now has several products, including bluetooth enabled speakers for a variety of animals and a portable speaker for walking a dog.
To validate her music, Pet Acoustics completed a study where dogs in kennels listened to no music, classical music by the likes of Beethoven and Mozart, and music by Marlow. Using biometric collars, it found that Marlow’s music led to calmer and lower pulse rates than the traditional classic music or no music.
She’s also gotten plenty of anecdotal feedback, like from a Broadway producer who had to give his cat Prozac to keep it calm on road trips. The producer switched to Marlow’s music and took his cat off the drug.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Marlow declined to discuss specifics about Pet Acoustics’ revenues, saying she “did very well.” The company has a handful of employees.
But it’s growth has coincided with the wave of America’s increasing pet obsession:
Overall US spending on pets has increased more than 50%, to $147B, since 2019, and dog ownership has almost doubled since the mid-1990s.
Food and treats constitute the largest spending category, according to the American Pet Products Association, at $64B, followed by vet care and product sales ($38B), and supplies, live animals, and over-the-counter medicine ($32B).
Back then, when Marlow was starting out, people would laugh when she told them she makes music for pets.
“Now, if I’m at a party and [say] I write music to calm dogs,” she says, “by the time I finish that sentence they’re on their iPhones ordering the music.”
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