Mood Music: How the ugly child of Muzak became its master
For years, the most devastating thing you could call music was Muzak.
It even sounds like an insulting name, right? A perversion of music played while you’re on hold to the dentist’s office, or in a lift going up to the work meeting where you’re about to be fired, or waiting for the meeting at the bank where they’re going to decline your loan request. It may sound made to be pleasing to the ear, it might even be made by musicians, but the very last thing that it is is music. This is Muzak.
However, what you might not know is that kind of music, otherwise known as elevator music, wasn’t called Muzak to make fun of it. No, turns out you can file Muzak right alongside Duct Tape and Google as entire corners of their respective market that are defined by one singular brand name, which gives rise to a very interesting question: who in their right mind thought that “Muzak” was a good name for their company?! The answer is George Owen Squier, the man who invented the original technical basis for it in the early 1920s.
Inspired by the company name Kodak, he decided to name his invention the same way, taking the word ‘music’ and putting an ‘Ak’ at the end. Originally created as a way of listening to music without the aid of Radio, the advances in radio by the 1930s meant that Muzak had to pivot into a new medium. Thus, Muzak began making music specifically for people to work to, a channel that any workplace could tune into to provide a pleasant(tm), yet stimulating(tm) backdrop for their work.
If that sounds Orwellian, it’s because it is. Yet, due to its availability and ability to be used basically anywhere, the company thrived for years, fighting back against advancements in music distribution methods until the company finally went bankrupt in 2009. Two years later, the ultimate humiliation hit. Muzak was purchased for $345million by its chief rival, the upstart background music company Mood Music, a company that was founded before the Second World War, being bailed out by one formed after 9/11. Ouch.
What happened to Muzak next?
Today, Muzak continues as a subsidiary of Mood Music, which dropped the “Music” part of its name shortly after the acquisition to become Mood Media. Listening to the way that Mood and its representatives talk about acquiring Muzak is enough to turn one’s stomach.
Full of that nauseating faux-effusive business speak about the “magic” of “keeping the spirit alive” of “not just an American company, but an American classic”. You’d think they were talking about buying the back catalogue of Bob Dylan and not thousands of chintzy versions of Pachabel’s ‘Canon in D’. One might think this is a particularly modern phenomenon, but the truth is that Muzak has always had this attitude.
Right back to the 1950s, they’re marketing their music as a psychological companion to the working man. Talking about how they tailor their music to 15-minute intervals to maximise the work of a captive workforce, bringing the tempo up so that listeners can increase their output alongside it. You see, I didn’t use the word Orwellian for nothing, working culture has always been Totally Normal.
Perhaps, then, the fandom that has sprung up around Muzak only in the last couple of years has been the perfect response to it. People looking at a perversion of art, one literally built to increase profit, and seeing it as art itself. The ultimate criticism of its own creators. A pity that the kind of people who have always been involved in running Muzak are also the exact people who will never, ever notice that criticism.
C’est la vie, I guess.