Muzak

Based on Muzak

In 1986, Ted Nugent—the hard rock guitarist famous for songs like "Stranglehold" and "Cat Scratch Fever"—made a public offer of ten million dollars to buy a company. His stated intention was to destroy it completely.

"Muzak is an evil force in today's society, causing people to lapse into uncontrollable fits of blandness," Nugent declared. "It's been responsible for ruining some of the best minds of our generation."

Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which owned the company at the time, refused his bid. But Nugent's theatrical gesture captured something real about how a single brand name had become synonymous with everything artificial and soul-deadening about modern commercial spaces.

The Curious Origins of Elevator Music

The technology behind Muzak has nothing to do with elevators, and the company never actually supplied music to them. The story begins instead with a military inventor and a made-up word borrowed from cameras.

George Owen Squier was a major general in the United States Army Signal Corps who earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University—making him one of the few people to hold both military rank and advanced academic credentials in that era. In 1910, he invented telephone carrier multiplexing, a technique that allowed multiple signals to travel simultaneously over a single wire. If that sounds abstract, think of it this way: before Squier's innovation, one wire could carry one conversation. Afterward, one wire could carry many.

Squier recognized that this same principle could deliver music directly to homes through existing electrical wires—no radio needed. In the 1920s, this mattered enormously. Radio was primitive, requiring expensive and temperamental equipment. Squier's technology promised something simpler: plug in, and music flows.

In 1922, a utility conglomerate called the North American Company bought the rights to Squier's patents and created a subsidiary called Wired Radio, Incorporated. The business model was elegant: deliver music to customers through their electrical wires and add a small charge to their monthly electric bill. Early tests on Staten Island in New York proved the technology worked.

But then radio improved. By the 1930s, households could receive broadcasts through the air for free, supported by advertising. Why pay for wired music when wireless music cost nothing?

A Name Borrowed from Photography

Squier pivoted. If the home market was dying, he would target businesses instead. Offices, factories, restaurants—places where owners could justify paying for a service that individual consumers wouldn't.

He also needed a new name. The word "Kodak" fascinated him. George Eastman had invented it for his camera company, creating a word that meant nothing but sounded distinctive and modern. Squier combined "music" with the Kodak suffix to coin "Muzak."

In 1934, Wired Radio became Muzak. The company would keep that name for nearly eighty years.

The Science of Stimulus Progression

Warner Bros. bought the Muzak division in 1937 and expanded it to new cities. Then an entrepreneur named William Benton acquired it with grander ambitions. Benton wanted Muzak in barbershops, doctors' offices, anywhere people waited or worked.

But playing music wasn't enough. Benton's company developed something they called Stimulus Progression—a pseudo-scientific approach to manipulating worker productivity through carefully engineered soundscapes.

Here's how it worked. Music was programmed in fifteen-minute blocks. Each block started slowly and quietly, then gradually increased in tempo and volume. The instrumentation grew brassier and more urgent. The idea was to unconsciously push workers to speed up their pace as the music intensified.

Then silence. For fifteen minutes, nothing played.

Company-funded research claimed this alternation between music and silence prevented listener fatigue and made the stimulating effect more powerful. Whether this was genuine psychology or corporate mythology is hard to say, but Muzak committed fully to the concept.

To control every element of their product, Muzak began recording their own orchestras. They hired top studio musicians in cities across the country—sometimes internationally—to create tracks specifically designed for particular time slots in the Stimulus Progression program. A piece intended for the mid-morning energy dip would sound different from one scheduled for the post-lunch slump.

From the West Wing to Outer Space

Through the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, Muzak's influence spread remarkably far.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower installed Muzak in the West Wing of the White House. Lyndon B. Johnson—before becoming president—owned the Muzak franchise in Austin, Texas. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration reportedly piped Muzak into space missions to soothe astronauts during long stretches of inactivity.

Think about that last detail for a moment. American astronauts, floating in the void between Earth and Moon, surrounded by the hostile vacuum of space, accompanied by the same bland orchestral arrangements playing in your dentist's waiting room. The absurdity is almost poetic.

The Baby Boomers Strike Back

Everything changed in the 1960s and 1970s. The baby boom generation—born after World War II and raised on rock and roll—came of age and entered the workforce. They had grown up with Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. They did not want anonymous orchestras playing tempo-manipulated instrumentals.

New competitors emerged with a different product: foreground music. Companies like AEI Music Network and Yesco licensed actual recordings by actual artists. Instead of orchestral renditions of popular songs stripped of vocals, they offered the real thing. They provided variety—rock, pop, jazz, blues, classical, even Spanish-language programming for Mexican restaurants.

Muzak's market share eroded. The brand name that once signified modern sophistication began to mean the opposite. "Muzak" became an insult, a shorthand for anything bland, corporate, and soulless.

The word underwent what linguists call genericization—when a trademark becomes so associated with a category that people use it to describe all products in that category, regardless of actual brand. "Kleenex" for any facial tissue. "Xerox" for any photocopy. "Muzak" for any background music you'd rather not hear.

The Long Decline

Muzak tried to adapt. In 1986, it merged with Yesco, one of its foreground music competitors. By 1997, the company had abandoned its signature style almost entirely, switching to original artists for most of its programming. Only the "Environmental" channel continued offering the old Stimulus Progression format.

Even that last holdout evolved. Instead of large orchestras, Muzak hired local Seattle musicians to record covers. Artists like Lennie Moore, Donny Marrow, and John Morton created instrumental versions designed to sound similar to the originals, with vocals replaced by piano, woodwind, or guitar. By 1999, the Environmental channel had accumulated over five thousand tracks.

Meanwhile, the corporate entity calling itself Muzak kept changing hands and changing form. A franchise operation since the 1940s, it became a division of the Field Corporation in the mid-1980s after Westinghouse sold it. The company pioneered what it called "audio architecture"—designing custom playlists for specific clients rather than broadcasting one-size-fits-all programming.

By 2010, Muzak distributed three million commercially available songs by original artists. It offered nearly one hundred channels via satellite or internet delivery. The company that once defined elevator music no longer made elevator music.

Bankruptcy, Acquisition, and Extinction

The transformation wasn't enough to save it.

In January 2009, as the global financial crisis devastated the economy, Muzak acknowledged it was struggling to restructure its debt. The company had cash but faced large obligations coming due in the worst possible economic climate. On February 10, 2009, Muzak Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company emerged from bankruptcy a year later, in January 2010, with its debt cut by more than half. It reorganized into three specialized units: Muzak Media for content acquisition, Touch for something called "Sensory Branding," and Muzak Systems for delivery technology.

But survival as an independent company proved temporary.

In March 2011, a company called Mood Media agreed to purchase Muzak Holdings for 345 million dollars. Mood Media had been founded only in 2004 but had grown rapidly in the background music business. The acquisition gave it access to Muzak's customer base of over three hundred thousand American locations.

Two years later, Mood Media announced it was retiring the Muzak brand name entirely. After nearly eighty years, the word "Muzak"—once a clever neologism coined by a military inventor entranced by Kodak cameras—would no longer identify an actual product.

The Afterlife of a Brand

Mood Media itself faced turbulent years. In 2017, it filed for bankruptcy protection. The following month, Apollo Global Management and GSO Capital Partners acquired the company. In July 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mood Media filed for bankruptcy again—the closure of retail stores, restaurants, and offices had devastated demand for background music services. The company emerged from this second bankruptcy in less than twenty-four hours, having lined up support from all stakeholders in advance. In January 2021, a private equity firm called Vector Capital acquired Mood Media.

Through all these corporate convulsions, the word "Muzak" continued its separate existence in the English language. It remains what linguists call a genericized trademark—a word that escaped its corporate origins to become common vocabulary. People who have never heard of Mood Media, who weren't born when Ted Nugent made his theatrical bid to destroy blandness, still use "Muzak" to describe music they find insipid or uninspiring.

The brand is dead. The word lives on.

The Broader Context of Background Sound

Muzak's story connects to larger questions about sound in commercial spaces—questions that remain relevant in an age of algorithmically generated playlists and streaming services.

Why do businesses play music at all? The original Muzak rationale—that engineered soundscapes could manipulate worker productivity—sounds dubious today. But retailers, restaurants, and hotels continue investing in audio environments. Studies suggest background music affects how long customers stay, how much they spend, and how they perceive a brand.

The contemporary version of this phenomenon might be Spotify's curated playlists for businesses, or the rise of AI-generated music designed specifically for background listening. When Spotify faces criticism for promoting music by fake artists—generic tracks created cheaply to fill algorithmic niches—the comparison to Muzak's anonymous orchestras seems inescapable.

Perhaps what Ted Nugent diagnosed as evil was simply capitalism discovering that music could be a tool rather than an art. The orchestras recording Stimulus Progression tracks weren't trying to create beauty; they were manufacturing productivity enhancement. The algorithms generating today's background content aren't trying to move listeners; they're trying to fill silence cheaply.

The difference is that Muzak was honest about it. The company never pretended its product was art. It was functional sound, designed for specific commercial purposes, labeled and sold as exactly that.

In an era when the line between authentic music and manufactured content grows increasingly blurry, there's something almost refreshing about a company that openly engineered blandness and called it by a made-up name.