February 17, 2008--Don't Stop the Muzak

Not to be lost in an era of iconic business failures, when a Lehman brothers and a Bear Stearns slip away, is the recently announced failure of a company that has been with us as a part of our public consciousness for many decades: Muzak, the New York Times reports, that ubiquitous supplier of elevator music, has filed for bankruptcy. (Article linked below.)

Like many other tottering firms, Muzak has run up so much debt that it cannot pay its creditors. Most of these are music companies that license the rights of the music Muzak provides to those elevators but more and more to retail stores and shopping centers.

Some critics have long decried the environmental pollution Muzak emits via its soporific adaptions of otherwise well-regarded popular music, seeing it as contributing to the dumbing-down of American culture. I do remember wondering about this myself when back in the 1970s even Beatles’ tunes such as easy-listening versions of Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby, which in themselves to me felt sacrilegious, showed up on the Muzak playlist.

Calming this indictment down a bit, if mildly offensive, Muzak did at least seem benign. What real harm could come of this usurpation?

Populist that I prided myself in being, I even found myself trying to make the case that bringing the Beatles to the masses this way, at a time when they were still seen to be divisive and even subversive, might be a good thing. There was very much a generation gap that not only separated the young from the values of their post-Depression parents, often revealed in the interests and tastes of youth, that might be good to attempt to bridge. Perhaps Musak, I took a deep breath and struggled to articulate, might help with that.

My friends, of course, shot me down, arguing that if America and the world were going to change, which we agreed was desperately needed, if other more significant gaps were to be closed—in wealth, in race, in gender—about which we also agreed, then the disruptive, some said revolutionary, popular culture of the young needed to be declared off limits to the encroachment of unbridled commerce.

They were right. How right has been underlined for me as I have recently been thinking about the possible demise of Muzak,

It come into existence in the 1920s when Major General George O. Squier secured a patent to transmit signals over electrical lines. He quickly saw this as a way to distribute music without the use of radio technology, which at the time required elaborate and expensive equipment. But by the 1930s radio transmission had become so much more practical that the general realized the best opportunity for his company (its name derived from the brand name Kodak) was to sell subscriptions to commercial customers of the music from the records it played at a central location and transmitted, still via electrical circuits. Thus the music soon heard in factories and retail stores all over the country.

World War II saw a further increase in the popularity of Muzak, as manufacturers pushed for ever-greater production to support the war effort. Muzak began to conduct its own psychological research, and soon customized the pace and style of the music provided throughout the workday in an effort to increase productivity (a technique it called ‘’Stimulus Progression’’). It also began recommending that the music be played at low volume levels, and discovered that alternating blocks of music with periods of silence increased production.

After the war, this approach to motivating workers quickly spilled over into white-collar workplaces and retail businesses, designed either to increase corporate output or stimulate sales through an early form of subliminal motivation. Flashing quick images of Coke and popcorn at movie theaters was not far behind.

Still, even knowing what I now know about greed, I hope they emerge from Chapter 11 since, I must confess, when you live on the 14th floor, in these times, a little Muzak goes a long way.