Hold music. Elevator music. Muzak. Whatever you call it, you’ve heard it – whether it be mawkish new age, sleazy sax solos or bloodless cover versions of Tears for Fears singles played by jobbing musicians just trying to feed their kids.
The company behind the phenomenon is Muzak, and they’ve got their tendrils in everything – the music you hear while you’re on hold, the music you hear in the changing room in Gap, even those interminable shopping centre Christmas playlists. Yup, thanks to the vagaries of copyright law stopping people from simply having a radio on, chances are you’re probably listening to a Muzak product.
Ever wonder where it comes from? Why it’s there? We’ve got 18 facts for you. Oh, and why not start up the below playlist to hear some of our favourite hold music songs as you read?
1 – Muzak was founded by Major General George Owen Squier in 1934. Squier’s other achievements include helping set up the US Air Force, and dying of pneumonia.
The very model of a Major General (or a massive dick, your choice)
2 – Taking inspiration (read: liberally thieving) from Kodak, Squier just merged the word ‘music’ with Kodak to form the company name. Funny, we would have called it Hellsongs.
3 – A survey by Gatwick airport in 1994 showed that 43% of its respondents hated muzak; the other 34% liked it and the rest were indifferent.
4 – Muzak claims that between it and its holdings, it commands the attention (or at least the subconscious) of a hundred million unfortunate people across a dozen countries.
5 – Alarmingly, sixty per cent of all the background music Americans hear is nefariously piped in from Muzak HQ.
6 – Muzak also provides the drive-through ordering systems used by many fast-food restaurants, therefore being partially responsible for thousands of cases of early-onset diabetes and heart attacks.
She won’t be smiling when she finds that swollen rat carcass in her beverage.
7 – Though they’re long associated with droning smooth jazz and instrumental cover versions of 80s pop songs, Muzak now provide a much broader service for its clients. Clients are assigned an ‘audio architect’ who painstakingly crafts a ‘programme’ of music specifically tailored to their business. Progress!
8 – In addition to a company’s standard programme, many receive an additional programme known as ‘The After-Hours’: uplifting songs for the poor schmucks working through the night restocking shelves.
9 – According to a Mori poll, 17% of people see muzak as “the thing they most detest about modern life”. And that’s over stuff like gout and Lady GaGa.
10 – After the war President Dwight D. Eisenhower pumped Muzak around the White House. Possibly to stop the interns from rutting in the Lincoln Bedroom. Possibly.
Lincoln: rolling in his grave
11 – Similarly, NASA incorporated Muzak into many of its lunar missions, to keep the astronauts calm and to stop them from contracting space madness.
12 – Muzak’s digital archive (dubbed ‘The Well’) is currently home to 2.5 million hand-picked songs, and grows at a rate of 20,000 songs per month.
13 – On average, it costs a 30,000 square foot store in UK £2,000 a year to pay for background music.
14 – In the UK, 31% of shop workers have to listen to the same album between six and 20 times a week, while a pitiful 16% will hear the same record more than 20 times during a week.
15 – In the 1940s, Muzak introduced the Stimulus Progression system, which they claimed would make workers more productive when exposed to muzak of increasing peppiness in recurring quarter of an hour cycles.
16 – During World War II, the stimulus progression system was claimed to boost worker production by 11%. Although it was met by a 9% increase in eye-clawing and a 4% rise in bleeding from the nose.
They might lose a finger, but at least they’ve got tunes
17 – Back in the days when elevators were a recent invention and prone to the occasional decapitating accident, music was piped in to soothe passengers’ nerves (or to usher them to their nightmarish deaths, depending on the elevator).
18 – Last year was Muzak’s 75th anniversary. Unfortunately, shortly after achieving that impressive milestone, they went bankrupt. Alas, the company managed to reform after reorganising its debt.
Stay tuned to the blog, where we may be running a competition to add your own choice of song to our hold music list.
#1 by Carl at 7th July 2010
The Smithsonian magazine called Muzak “a stupefyingly bland, toxically pervasive form of unregulated air pollution, about as calming as the drone of a garbage compactor” which goes to show that laconic hyperbole has been around at least as long as the need for it. (source)
However, the really interesting thing about Muzak is that their founder George Owen Squier pioneered (indeed, patented) a technique called multiplexy, which allows multiple signals to be transmitted through one cable, at differing carrier frequencies. One application was transmitting sound over the top of the 50Hz mains electricity supply, meaning shops didn’t have to tie up the phone line receiving music all day long. Impressive stuff for the 1930′s and pioneering work in a field which led, arguably, to making the Internet feasible. Without Squier and his Muzak it is possible we’d still be waiting for the web and all its wonderful blog content to illuminate our humdrum lives with insightful, informative intellectual feasts such as the Powwownow blog. So, you know; feel grateful when you hear the delicate sound of telecommunicative progress tinkling through the air…
#2 by Chantelle at 9th July 2010
Wow – I had no idea “elevator” music was such an organised phenomena? I thought it was just general bad taste in music on behalf of all departmental store management. Very interesting.