Question of the Day - 02 July 2017

What you’re hearing is generically referred to as “muzak,” taking its name from the leading ambient-music supplier Muzak®.

Muzak is so ubiquitous that it's become an urban-dictionary term connoting elevator music and other bland mind-numbing forms of melody. The actual company, perhaps recognizing this, has changed its name to Mood Media™ — Business Music Streaming. It's retained by companies from AT&T to Whole Foods, offering multiple subcategories (like “Be-Tween” and “Divas”) under master categories that include Pop, Country, Urban, Lounge, Latin, Classics & Decades, Specialty & Lifestyle, Dance & Electronica, Jazz & Blues, World (which includes Chinese pop), Rock, Body & Soul, Classical & Instrumental, Holidays & Happenings, and Religious, which isn't too popular in casinos.

And if that plethora of choices — 17 subcategories under Rock alone — doesn’t quite fit your customer base, you can craft a custom playlist with Mood Media's help, a process called “audio architecture.” (In its waning days, the Riviera had a “No Ke$ha” rule.)

While casinos don’t disclose the cost of such services as a rule, Boyd Gaming spokesman David Strow graciously provided some clarification of how the system works. “We pay a flat fee to a music service for our background music that typically includes both the hardware and the music selection. Royalties are included within this flat fee, rather than on a per-song basis.”

The original inspiration for muzak came from inventor George Owen Squier, almost a century ago, when he devised a system for transmitting music over electrical wires. In 1922, he sold his patents to North America Utility Co., which delivered music to homes through the Wired Radio company, with the service fee showing up on electrical bills. However, demand slackened as radio became more practical and affordable for the average American. Squier, still connected with Wired Radio, suggested targeting businesses as the new customer base and devised the name “Muzak” (a combo of music + Kodak). It was first sold to Warner Bros., then to William Benton, a senator from Connecticut and publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

According to one source, Muzak was used as subtle workplace manipulation: “The music was programmed in 15-minute blocks, gradually getting faster in tempo and louder and brassier in instrumentation, to encourage workers to speed up their pace.” This was called “Stimulus Progression.” Between the wars, Muzak recorded its own product, rather than sub-licensing it, and even had a studio orchestra that cranked out tunes. Although some protested that “stimulus progression” was a form of mind control, Muzak was unstoppable, its consumers including NASA, which used it to help astronauts to chill out, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had the canned music piped into the West Wing.

Inevitably, competitors arose, including Yesco (a Seattle company unrelated to Las Vegas-based Young Electric Sign Co.). Their advantage was that they licensed original recordings, taking advantage of a shift in consumer tastes. For the first time, vocals were heard. Latino audiences were targeted with Spanish-language programming. Deciding it would rather switch than fight, Muzak merged with Yesco, but the latter came out the winner in the programming department, including the abandonment of “stimulus progression” (for which office workers were undoubtedly grateful). While generic elevator music was generally shelved in the merger, it clung to popularity in some markets, Japan in particular.

Muzak continued to refine its business model, switching to a franchise method of selling its product. It also survived a takeover attempt by rocker and gun enthusiast Ted Nugent. The latter intended to buy the company and close it, calling muzak an “evil force” in society, turning minds into mush. It even made it through a 2009 bankruptcy filing. Today Mood Media has some 300,000 clients and if you’re listening to annoyingly repetitive filler tunes while endlessly on hold with a casino’s front desk, you probably have Muzak to blame.

Maybe Ted Nugent was right.