Stepping off a bustling Oxford Street into the Marks & Spencer flagship Marble Arch store, Nigel Rodgers stops, listens, then lets out a contented sigh.



“Nothing,” he declares, with some satisfaction. “When noise is succeeded by silence, there is a sense of release.”



For Rodgers, that sound of silence marks the culmination of two decades of diligent endeavour by his campaign group Pipedown, founded to wage war on muzak in public spaces. M&S’s decision last week to ban piped music in its stores is his “first major triumph in several years”.



Certainly, it was welcomed by Chris Olsson, 62, shopping at M&S with her daughter Nellie Grand, 22. “Thank you, thank you,” she tells Rodgers, as he explains Pipedown’s campaign. “I noticed something was different but didn’t immediately know what it was.”



Olsson, from Sweden, prefers the silence. “Yes, it’s good. Because in so many shops now there is music.” She believes marketing experts think it boosts sales. “It will be interesting to see the figures,” she says. And, while her daughter said she usually did not notice background music, “if it is too loud I might leave the store. It depends on the store.”



It is more than 20 years since Rodgers – author, art historian and environmentalist, then in his 30s and dining with a girlfriend whom he was unable to hear over the loud background music – first determined to do something about muzak.



His one-man mission has since burgeoned into an organisation with 1,500 UK members, whose early significant successes included Gatwick airport’s decision to ban piped music in public areas. Today there are branches in Germany, Austria and plans for one in the US.



Ten years ago, Rodgers and 40 or so of his members marched on Selfridges on Oxford Street after complaints to his organisation about the volume of background music. He managed to make a short speech before being bundled out by security.



Today Selfridges is much improved, he notes, walking through its departments. Background music is evident only in certain areas, one being near the Levi jeans section in menswear, where David Alan, 66, from Toronto is browsing. “I wish you’d come to Toronto. It drives me crazy. It’s outrageous there,” he tells Rodgers. “There are some places I refuse to go into because the music is so loud. I think you’re doing a great service to the citizens of Britain.”



Rodgers maintains there are real concerns about the acoustic wallpaper that is now part of everyday life, and that research indicates the majority of people don’t want it.



Many people with hearing and vision problems find it overwhelmingly distracting, as do some people with autism. Asda has introduced a “quiet hour” on Saturdays aimed at those with autism. “They even turn the escalators off, which I think is going a bit far,” says Rodgers.



Older people, too, are more distracted, with research in 2013 showing they hear background music louder, a condition known as presbycusis, and suffer noise nuisance on their hearing aids.



Pipedown appears to be going from strength to strength. The name is catchy – albeit a little confusing in Scotland where members of the Edinburgh Pipedown branch must constantly be reassured it does not seek a ban on bagpipes. Its logo owes much to Edvard Munch’s scream. An initial plan for an HMV-style dog looking at gramophone with a cork plugged in it was abandoned after tentative copyright approaches were met with a lawyer’s letter several pages long from the company.



Christmas can be the worst time of the year for shop staff who have to listen to Jingle Bells 300 times. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

Rodgers’s ultimate ambition is for legislation to ban music in public areas of hospitals, where patients are trapped in their beds “unable to escape” the noisy hospital radio or TV. Complaints he has received from patients include: “Chemotherapy is bad enough without the blood-boiling irritation of muzak!” Another, describing the “dread, dread, dread” of “bloody TV soundtracks” on his shared hospital ward, pleads: “Heaven, please hear me and let my end come without music or TV.”

Christmas is the worst time, especially for staff. “Poor sales staff may have to listen to Jingle Bells 300 times,” said Rodgers. At Christmas in 2007, some Austrian shop workers sought compensation for suffering from the “psychological terror” of piped music – Silent Night was a particular peeve. The city of Linz recently declared itself Beschallungsfrei – free of unwanted music.

In Starbucks, on Charing Cross Road, as customers sip their lattes to a gentle background jazz medley, the volume is low enough for Carmen Brion, 40, to tolerate. Welcoming the Pipedown campaign, she tells Rodgers: “I’m highly sensitive. I have to really try hard to filter out loud music, which makes it difficult to talk over it. I think psychologists have started to recognise that some people are much more sensitive. We tend to be, maybe, more introvert. There have been times when I have just had to walk out of a shop because it is too loud. Camden market, it is bad there, as the music is just so loud.”