Muzak

Muzak can't escape the elevator legacy. The 75-year-old company stopped making orchestral and light jazz versions of pop songs years ago (decades, even), and yet people reacted to reports of the company's bankruptcy with amused relief, as if they had just learned that their annoying cousin wouldn't be attending this year's family reunion. Why does everyone still hate Muzak?

The brainchild of two-star World War I General George Owen Squier, the company began as Wired Radio Inc. in 1922 and was first test-marketed to families in Staten Island, New York, who used a small receiver to listen to records cranked by hand across the river in Manhattan. Squier was in need of a catchier name, and just before he died in 1934 he combined the name of the popular camera company Kodak with the word "music" and came up with a new term: Muzak.

As wireless radio became increasingly popular in private homes, Muzak turned its attention to the commercial market: background music in hotels, restaurants and of course, the elevator. Calming melodies were broadcast in early skyscrapers to ease a fearful public suspicious of traveling in a giant metal box. The process seemed to work and by the 1940s, Muzak was deep into the science of mood music. It marketed a theory called "Stimulus Progression" which stated that a person's outlook could be altered with music. Offices played 15-minute blocks of Muzak tracks — usually produced by an in-house orchestra — that increased in tempo until the final song was so upbeat the workers found themselves happily toiling away when they normally would start to lag. (Read an article about using the power of sound as a retail sales tool.)

Soon, Muzak was everywhere. Eisenhower pumped it into the White House and NASA astronauts listened to it in space. And then in the 1960s, a rival company called Yesco began experimenting with "foreground" music — songs by real bands that were meant to be listened to, not absorbed in some sort of mood-altering state of aural osmosis. That's when Muzak started to become uncool. After the Beatles broke up, John Lennon insulted Paul McCartney by claiming his songs sounded like Muzak. Lily Tomlin joked that she was worried that Muzak's inventor was going to invent something else. In 1989, Ted Nugent even tried to buy the company for $10 million just so he could shut it down.

Today, Muzak pipes 2.6 million songs into thousands of stores and offices around the world. It is in Macy's and Sears, Sunglass Hut and Marriott, Chipotle and Caribou Coffee. It helps Williams-Sonoma sell waffle makers, PetSmart sell hamsters, and it entertains customers when AT&T puts them on hold. Muzak owns over 700 Beatles recordings, 900 by Miles Davis and 1,400 by Elvis Presley. But it also owns songs by 50 Cent, Kanye West and TV on the Radio. With a daily listening audience of roughly 100 million, and playlists tailored to every possible listening experience, Muzak is has become the omnipresent tastemaker of America.

Business can buy prepackaged bundles of songs with names like Half Pipe (Green Day), Concrete Beats (Young Jeezy) and Nashville USA (Kenny Chesney). The programs, transmitted by satellite, cost about $65 a month. Each song is screened for offensive material and analyzed according to tempo, melody, harmony and whether or not it has anything that the casual listener might consider annoying — a long guitar solo or Bob Dylan's harmonica. The songs are organized so that they flow into each other via something called "dynamic range progression," which avoids the volume-jolt that occurs when a soft song fades into something that starts with a bang (ah, the ruin of many a mixtape). Only one package, Environmental, still offers easy-listening elevator instrumentals, which are very popular in Japan.

Muzak also has about 400 clients who order custom-tailored playlists every month. The company occasionally dips into non-music fields: after September 11th it flirted with a closed-circuit security system and is currently in the business of scent: the olfactory experience of walking through a Marriott Hotel has been thoughtfully crafted by Muzak.

A series of acquisitions, sales and bad business moves have left the company struggling financially in recent years. Muzak's headquarters have moved from Cleveland to New York to Seattle and in 2001, to Fort Mill, South Carolina, just outside of Charlotte. "There might have been a few more moves in there," says Bob Finigan, Muzak's vice president of marketing. "I don't know off the top of my head." Saddled with debt, Muzak missed a $105 million payment to its creditors and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Feb 10. It is now seeking protection from nearly $440 million worth of debt. "We look to emerge out of this as quickly as possible," says Finigan, who expects a full financial turn-around in a few months to a year. That may be possible; if not, the world may suddenly become very quiet.

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