Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness
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Learn more today at 800-4ROCKET or visit rocket.com. Rocket Mortgage LLC, licensed in all 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org, number 3030. Hey there, everybody. It's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our 2021 episode on Muzak. And you might ask, who could possibly like the noisome, omnipresent annoyance that was Muzak?

Well, me, I like music. So there. But if you're not over 40, you might not even know that there was a time you couldn't step out in public from department stores. Those are in something we call malls to elevators without schmaltzy string arrangements of pop music pummeling you with their saccharine sound. And you know what? You're the worst off for not having experienced it. Instead, you can experience this episode and I hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Dave C. Kustin. I said it right this time. I thought it was Kustin. No? If you're in France, that's how you would say it. But here in the United States, you say Kustin. Can I start this off by saying something?

Oh, boy, I'm worried about what you're going to say, but okay. Well, this episode is on Muzak, and I started thinking last night, I was thinking about your love of Muzak, which is not at all ironic. Not in the least. But you can't say that kind of thing these days. People don't believe you. I know. It's true. Everyone, I know Josh very well, and I was thinking of...

And I like all kinds of music too, but in my heart, I'm a rock and roll guy. And I was thinking about your top musical genres that are above rock and roll in your picking order. Not in order. I counted easy listening, music, disco, art rock, kraut rock.

And I probably missed a couple. Krautrock is below rock and roll. I want to like Krautrock. It just doesn't quite jive with me. I like some, but not all of it. And then stuff, I think Art Rock is sort of that avant-garde. Like, I don't, you know, love Yoko, but you certainly are a bit of a Yoko apologist. Yeah.

Sure. Grace Jones, stuff like that. Oh, I love Grace Jones for sure. What about Talking Heads? They go in there too, right? Oh, they'd probably be. I mean, they literally went to art school together. Yeah, I mean, they kind of span from art rock to new wave to like world music by the time they finished.

Yeah, yeah, I know. But, yeah, I mean, I certainly love the Talking Heads, but all of those for you are above good old-fashioned rock and roll, I think. Yeah, you also left out 90s techno. I've been listening to a lot of that lately, too, like Alternate and The Prodigy and everything. But you love music. You really do. I do. I do, too, actually. I don't know. I'm so glad. I don't know how much I'll like—

I will listen to some of that stuff, and we'll talk about Eno in here, of course. Old sourpuss Brian Eno. But I love listening to his ambient stuff, which he sort of wrote as an antidote to Muzak. Again, we'll talk about that more later. But I do like, in certain circumstances, that Muzak thing is really...

great to have on in my house is background music. And it serves that same purpose. One of the big reasons why too is because you can get stuff done with it. Like lyrics can be so distracting. They just latch onto your brain and say, no, no, no, pay attention to me.

I'm talking to you now. Muzak does the opposite of that. It says, go, be free, but also enjoy this. Like there's like a whole part of your brain that Muzak can tap into that doesn't require your conscious thought, but it still produces like good feelings. And, you know, like people just smack Muzak around like it's just –

it's so bland and it's so soulless. And I totally disagree with that. Like if you actually stop and listen to music, it's really, really technically proficient. It's, it's,

frequently well done. It's often very clever and creative and inventive, which is really saying something because you're doing this in the confines of covering an existing song in a way that makes it familiar and easy to recognize, but also takes away any intrusiveness that it might have.

It's tough to do, and I really, I just, I love Muzak. You're absolutely right. Like, I listened to Muzak this whole time, not just when we were researching Muzak today, but also when I was researching the Havana syndrome, and I realized, like, this is my normal thing. This is the same stuff I listen to when I'm researching anyway. Yeah, and we can go ahead and dispel a couple of, or not myths, but clear up a couple of things right off the bat. First of all, Muzak is a name brand brand.

And people can kind of collectively use the term Muzak or have collectively use that term for what's called like potted plant music or elevator music or shopping music. But it is actually a brand name, which we'll get to the history of. And then the second thing is it gets the name elevator music, but...

Part of the myth is that people said, well, they put it on elevators because people were afraid to death of elevators early on and it calmed people down or it covered up the noise of the clanking elevators. I'd never heard that before. Did you? Yeah, neither one of those things are true. Total myth. My guess is that it was played on elevators. And because you're in such a closed little box that's usually quiet, it's...

It just was way more noticeable than like in a big office full of people working. So people called it elevator music. That's my guess. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there wasn't music on elevators before. But for several decades in the 20th century, like there weren't many elevators you could get on because people didn't have elevators in their house. So it was a public building you were in.

they weren't playing music to, to, of some form very frequently Muzak. That great Blues Brothers scene. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're, they're going up to the, what, the Cook County assessor's office and like there, there's the entire Chicago police department is after them, but they're forced to get on this elevator and the, the girl from Ipanema is playing. I think my favorite part of that scene is there's,

Just dozens and hundreds of cops and SWAT guys just, you know, hut, hut, hut, hut, hut, when they're rappelling and doing all this stuff. And then there's the one shot of the lone guy rappelling down the side of the building, and he's by himself just going, hut, hut, hut, hut. Yeah, that's a good one. So funny. There's another scene, too, from around that era, a few years later, from Airplane 2, where it's like Rip Torn –

I believe it's Rip Torn, the arty from the Larry Sanders show. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know the other guy he's talking to. But anyway, they're walking and talking, and they have to get on an elevator. And the elevator door opens, and it's just blaring like eardrum-shattering decibel MacArthur Park. And they have to get on. People are coming off the elevator with their hands to their ears with splitting headaches from this. Yeah.

it's just completely the opposite of what elevator music is supposed to be like but it's a good little scene too as far as elevator music goes well I mean that's kind of one of the points too is Muzak has long been a movie trope and a TV trope and then been lampooned in scenes just like the Blues Brothers scene where there's something chaotic going on and then you cut back to

to the sound of Muzak playing wherever the other scene is setting. Right, yeah. Very, very fun stuff. But that started, I guess it started with the Blues Brothers, which came out in 1980. But before that, that was, like, Muzak was...

Not really lampoon. I mean, not everybody liked it. It really kind of started to get a little backlash in the late 60s, early 70s, as we'll see. But there was a very significant chunk of the 20th century, again, from maybe 1950 to 1980, we'll say.

where everywhere you went in public, including if you took a Greyhound bus or if you were on a plane or you happened to be in Air Force One or you were at the mall, in an elevator, at your office, everywhere, Muzak was playing. There was Muzak playing everywhere. It was just a part of life that was inescapable, actually. Yeah, so let's go back in time and talk about the inventor of Muzak,

And this is sort of a fun fact of Muzak. The man's name is George Square. It is spelled...

but he swears it's pronounced square. I'm really impressed, man. I had not come up with that one. Or he swore it was pronounced square. Yeah, that's kind of one of the funny jokes, like the guy who invented Muzak's was square. Yeah. But Major General George Square was born in 1865, if you believe that. And he has just a laundry list of accomplishments that,

as a human being. He earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in electrical science. He was

an Army engineer with a PhD, I think the first one. Yeah. And he was, I believe, the lead Signal Corps officer for the Army as well. He was. He also was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, which connects this episode to the other one today. That's right. Because he came up with something called a tree telephone. He figured out how to use any tree, but preferably one –

fully leaved, I guess. I don't know what you'd call that. As a receiver and transmitter for radio signals. He figured out how to use a tree, a living tree for that.

He was – here's another little fun fact. He was one of the first airplane passengers ever because he was way into human flight and got together with the Wright brothers. And in 1906, consulted with them, and they said, hey, why don't you take a ride in our new little biplane? You'll probably live.

Right. I looked at the document for our Wright Brothers episode and he did not appear. I don't think we mentioned him, but he might have been the first airline passenger from what I saw. Yeah, where he really made a big name for himself pre-Muzak was this

invention, which is what we call multiplexing, which is he figured out, or maybe wire wireless communications, which is something he worked on with the army. He basically figured out how to get multiple uses of

out of single telephone lines. Telephone wires were, you know, there are only so many, so you were really limited as to what you could do with them and how many people could use them. So he basically figured out a way to increase their output and efficiency

by multiplexing and by sending superimposing high-frequency radio signals over those low-frequency telegraph signals, basically just allowing you to use the wire at the same time, the same wire. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like if you think of like a wave, if it's low-frequency, there's big wide gaps in between. You can fit a higher frequency that's tighter and squished together in those gaps, but you're still using the same line. And, you know, this...

was the guy who came up with that. That's an enormous advancement in telecommunications that we're still putting use today in some applications, but definitely helped like the early internet along. It was just a huge contribution to humanity. Like forget even just Muzak, like just that alone would probably warrant like an episode for George Square. Yeah, and I think he was like, everyone should be able to use this.

So I'm going to open source it and everyone can use this new multiplexing technology. AT&T came along and said, we'll use it. And then, you know what? You stole it from us, actually. Right. He came up with it, but since he left it open, they decided to just take it from him and sue him for it. I think he sued them, but it didn't work. That's right. You're right.

But he still was able to use this wire-wireless technology with multiplexing. And at the time, people were starting to get into radio broadcasts. But radio, wireless radio that you would just have in your house that's picking up radio waves at a station, that was not widespread at the time. So George Squire said, you know what? I understand people want music in their house. I'm going to give it to them. I'm going to use that multiplexing technology.

And I'm going to run sound waves over the electrical wires that go into the house. Brilliant. And I'm going to sell this. It is brilliant. I'm going to sell this service to people's homes for $1.50 a month, about $20 today. Wow.

And it's just part of your utility bill because it's coming in through your electrical company. And there's actually a section of Cleveland called the Lakewood, I believe Lakewood area, that was the pilot for this wired wireless radio station.

that George Square invented. The problem was is by the time they deployed it, wireless radio was already a thing. And so we had this really great idea that just no longer had an application. Yeah.

Yeah, he basically invented the first music subscription service. Exactly. Yeah, and he had multiple channels too. Like when you subscribed, you got news, you got dance music. There was like I think three different channels you could choose from. Howard Stern?

Yep. Howard Stern was on back then. Baba Booey. So he had that technology, though, and he said, you know what? This is a good idea, though. Maybe I can think of how to use this in offices and stores. And in 1934, he looked up at Kodak, very successful corporation, and said, I love that name and I love music. Let's just call it Muzak.

And history changed, and maybe we should take a break. Okay, let's do it. All right, we'll be right back. ♪ music playing ♪

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Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. So in the parlance of today, Chuck, George Square and his Muzak Corporation pivoted

from home consumer markets to business markets. And that just knocked it out of the park because it turned out that there were a lot of companies, hotels, restaurants, clubs. I think the Stork Club was an early customer that said, you know what? It's really going to make our place seem fancy if we've got music piping in.

all the time. So yes, we would like to sign up for your service. And that's really where Muzak kind of started to take off. Yeah. So Muzak, I mean, we haven't even said what it is. Surely people know, but Muzak are instrumental tracks. And you did mention that there were no vocals. So we kind of hinted at it. It's a big one. Yeah. But they're instrumental tracks that are cover songs

kind of anything you can think of. I mean, I've heard some music of some heavy rock. It can be classical music. It can be old standards.

But the point is they are instrumental versions that are re-recorded. They don't just take the vocals out. It's not karaoke style. Right. It is re-recorded, arranged, and recorded by professional, really good musicians, orchestras sometimes. Yeah. And it is – that's what it is. And it's great. The end.

And very frequently, it's made into a much more mellow version of itself. Like any rough edges are taken off. Since they take the vocals out, it's not like that vocal melody is non-existent any longer. They just replace it with something else.

So if they're trying to go for something like a little more upbeat or uptempo, they'll replace the vocals with, say, like a saxophone. If they're trying to do something a little more mellow, they'll replace the vocals with a string section. Yeah, or a harp, perhaps. Yeah, that's one of the things that Muzak is very famous for, is what's called masses of strings, just strings upon strings. In fact, one of the early, I guess, big name instruments

groups that produced Muzak was called 101 Strings. They probably were absolutely accurate in that. Like there's just tons of strings everywhere. Violins, cellos, violas, every string instrument you can throw at it, they just layer upon layer in these songs. It's one of the hallmarks of Muzak. Yeah, and there are many versions of

Antonio Carlos Shobim's Girl from Ipanema, but the Muzak version is one of the most popular, and that 101 Strings version is the most ubiquitous from that lot. I do encourage people to go watch the YouTube, though, of Frank Sinatra's

And Joe Beam singing that song live on TV. Because it's great in every way. They're just sitting next to each other. And the shot isn't wide at first. And they're just sort of singing back and forth to each other. And Frank's doing his thing. And then it cuts to the wide. And Frank is like totally kicked back with his legs crossed with a cigarette in his hand. Exactly like you would hope. But he looks like he just not rolled out of bed because he's put together, but

He looks like he rolled from his wicker bag to his wicker chair. Right. For this performance.

Can I get some cocaine in here, baby? That's Joe Piscopo as Frank Sinatra. Do you ever listen to Joe Beam's stuff? Oh, yeah. I love that old lounge stuff. It's really great, Brazilian stuff. Yeah, his record Stoneflower is just a masterpiece from beginning to end. Yeah, that's good party music. Yeah, that's another thing, though, too, is like it's so mellow that to take that kind of music and then –

make it into Muzak is like, it's almost like it takes a certain amount of audacity. You know, like I was listening to, I found, so there's, I want to, I want to point people to two different Muzak records that are on YouTube. One is called More Than Music, period, and Environment. It's a 1981 Muzak record and,

And it has a version of sailing. Christopher Cross's Sailing, one of the most mellow. Yeah, which is already music to sleep to. Exactly. They figured out how to basically make you lose control of your bladder listening to this. Music to wet your bed to. Yeah. That's a good one. And then the other one is called The Blue Album.

And it is from 1974, I believe. And both of them are really great. That's good introductions to Muzak if you're not into it already. All right. So Muzak is trucking along in the 30s. They get to the 40s and they think, you know what? We need a better way to sell this stuff and to pitch this to businesses and corporations. So why don't we...

hire some people to research music and to figure out what kinds of music keep people happy and working. And because people, you know, they work hard in the morning and then they sort of lag a bit before lunch and then they really lag sort of a couple of hours after lunch. So why don't we do this? Why don't we study it? Let's call it stimulus progression. It's a bit pseudoscience. It makes sense. It is in that it's not been proven. It makes sense to everyone who

I feel like knows about it. Like, sure, music can pick you up and make you work harder, but it's pseudoscience in that I don't think it's ever been scientifically proven. I got you. Okay. Yeah, because I keep seeing it just like dismissed as pseudoscience, but then there were plenty of early studies that were done by legitimate industrial psychologists and other like efficiency experts, that kind of thing, that showed that there really was a significant difference

like improvement in productivity or less sick days, that kind of stuff in places that have Muzak compared to places that didn't have Muzak pumped into the office. Yeah, I think maybe their specific claims about a workday might have been a little – I mean everywhere I read said it was basically not a marketing scam but a marketing –

tool that they kind of invented. I got you. But so one thing to say about this, we're going to talk about it in a second, stimulus progression, is that they did kind of plow money that they were making. They were making a lot of money starting in the late 40s, early 50s. They plowed it back into research and

to basically come up with scientific evidence to back up their claims, which you can really kind of see the ghost of George Square still looming over the company, you know, this decade or so after he died. It's always been this kind of science-based,

if not science-based company that's also been an early adopter of technology, as we'll see. Yeah, I mean, that is certainly fair. It was never just like, hey, we're just going to play a bunch of what people might consider droll background music. Like they really did, I think, I don't think it was a scam. I think they really did try to study music

working environments. And what they did with his stimulus progression was they divided the workday into 15 minute increments and basically set a DJ playlist every 15 minutes and they assigned a stimulus value from one to six, one being really, really mellow, six being, you know, super up. And they basically went through and almost like a Pandora sort of curated playlist type of thing

to get people to work hard and efficiently throughout a day. And companies bought in, including the U.S. Army. Yeah, I think World War II is basically cited as the moment when MUSEK kind of proved itself enough, at least, to start being adopted by very large companies. And then within a few years after the war, by like the very early 50s, they started to spread more and more to even smaller and smaller companies.

And it was this idea that if you played Muzak and Muzak's, you know, patented stimulus progression model, you know, you're going to avoid that mid-morning slump that like every worker goes through, you know, in productivity. And then the mid-afternoon slump, you could avoid that too. And think about how many more widgets you could make if your employees don't, you know, slack off productivity-wise from 10.30 to lunch.

And then from like 2.30 until they go home. Like imagine if this very pleasant music is just kind of keeping them humming along. What people call a forward, just unconscious sense of forward momentum. The tempo in your environment is moving subtly faster and faster. Yeah.

And so to keep people from going insane, part of the stimulus progression was that the songs in a 15 minute increment would kind of go up in tempo and then you'd have a 15 minute break of silence and then the music would come back on again. But then

this 15 minutes, their first song, the tempo of their first song would probably start a little faster than the tempo of the first song of the last 15 minutes. Right. And so all of a sudden, next thing you know, you're making widgets like a maniac.

because you're being manipulated by the stimulus progression model. At least, again, according to Muzak. I get what you're saying. It's not like Harvard came along and said, yes, we've studied this thoroughly and this is exactly what happens. This is company claims, but it is intuitively sensible at least. Well, yeah. I mean, you need only to host a house party once

And play music yourself to determine how music can affect the mood of a group of people. You put on Groove is in the Heart and you know what's going to happen. Yeah, everybody's going to shake their groove thing. Everyone's going to shake their groove thing. If you put in old sourpuss Brian Eno's music for Airports...

Not a good party thing. No, it's not. And since you brought him up for the second time, I say we discuss Brian Eno momentarily. Sure. I mean, I love that record and I love a lot of his stuff, including his ambient music experimental stuff.

records. I think it's really, really good stuff to have on if it's a nice gray day outside and you're getting work done. I really enjoyed his background music, but it's definitely not up in any way. You know what I found is a really good one for what you just described? You ever listen to Future Sound of London? No.

They have an album, like a double album called Life Forms. And it's about as amazing as Ambient gets. So you should check that one out. Emily got me into Ambient. I call her Emily when she's listening to that stuff. She really got me. She called it Ambient Groove. She really got me into that stuff over the years. Is that like Enigma? Like Zero Seven and, you know, stuff that's.

She calls it ambient groovy, just sort of mellow and groovy and like 07 and more Chiba. And there was a certain era, I think, where that stuff peaked. Massive attack a little bit. Oh, yeah. It's good stuff. Yeah, I think you'd like life forms then. Future Sound of London stuff is normally a little more, you know, super cerebral and intelligent, but it's also fairly dancey. Life forms is probably their most ambient stuff around. Yeah.

So Eno, though, let's get back to him. He kind of came up with this as an antidote to Muzak, right? Yes. If you like ambient music, you better thank your lucky stars for Muzak because were it not for Muzak, you might not have ambient music, at least not now. Maybe it would be coming 50 years from now. Who knows? Yeah. He said –

I love that in this article it says, as reported by Red Bull Music. Right. Eno said this, and this was, I think, for the liner notes, actually, to Music for Airports. Whereas canned music's intention is to brighten the environment by adding stimulus to it, ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular. It must be as ignorable as it is interesting. So he hits on something, though, that people would come to really resent about Muzak.

is not even just necessarily the syrupy-ness of the music itself, but the intent behind the music, that it was always intended to basically manipulate your mood into making you a better worker, a more docile consumer. It was...

poking at your brain to get you to do things that you may or may not want to do. Maybe you will be less likely to punch some guy on the bus because there's music playing, which is a good thing. We should not be punching other people on the bus. But the point is, is you're being mind controlled in a certain way. And eventually people got kind of resentful of that. Yeah. No, that's true. We're not there yet, though. We're not there yet. There was actually a point in time, though, Chuck, where

where Muzak and popular music were basically one in the same. Yeah, that was sort of, I mean, one of the heydays of Muzak certainly was in that when, you know, when the Glenn Miller Orchestra was pop music on the radio, Muzak wasn't a far stretch from some of that stuff. So it was sort of all one in the same. I think it was as that, as styles changed,

and the 60s and 70s start rolling along that Muzak became really sort of a bad word to a lot of people. Right. And one of the reasons I saw that really explained it to me, because, you know, things change. Society just changed between the 1950s and the 1960s. It just abruptly changed. But

But that doesn't fully explain why Muzak just was suddenly looked down upon. A good explanation I saw is that lyrics became really, really important in the late 60s. People had something to say, and Muzak does not include lyrics. It completely undermines the point of Muzak if you put lyrics in or don't rearrange the lyrics with strings. So Muzak kind of couldn't...

couldn't keep up with that. It's not like it went away. It doubled down. It kept doing what it was doing. And in fact, it would take some of those pop hits that had really monumentally important lyrics and just take the lyrics out and replace it with a saxophone or something like that. Yeah, they didn't have to do that. I think it's interesting. They could have had a really mellow singer at a certain point come in. And I really respect the fact that they were like, nope, the singer is a violin and I don't want to hear it anymore. Right.

Right, but a lot of these songwriters in particular, like I think Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Boz Skaggs.

All of them refused to let their music be covered by Muzak or any of its competitors. But Paul Simon, I saw, said he always knew he had a hit when he heard a Muzak version of it, like at the mall or something like that, which is kind of like Weird Al covering Nirvana. Like Kurt Cobain said that he knew that Nirvana had made it when Weird Al covered Smells Like Teen Spirit. I think it's basically the same thing.

Oh, I think most musicians, unless you're a Ted Nugent who, and we'll get to that, but very famously sort of offered to buy Muzak when they fell upon hard times so he could basically burn it to the ground. I think most musicians...

deep down think it's kind of an honor when one of their songs is Muzakified. It's got, yeah, you'd have to. It's got to be cool, right? I just want to find out what somebody's going to do with it. Because like I was saying at the beginning, like, it really takes some creativity to come up with, okay, what can I replace this with that's not just completely predictable or boring, but also isn't going to grab everybody's attention. Because that's, again, not the point of Muzak. It's one of the...

I don't know if it was a slogan of the Muzak Corporation or not, but they basically said that they fill in the awkward pauses in life. That's good to say it. Yeah, it's like you were saying at the party. If you're at a party that doesn't have any music on, you just...

Probably just get smashed out of your skull because you're just trying to lubricate the social situation so much. Whereas if you put on music, it's like it takes a lot of that edge off. That was one of the points too with Muzak. And then also to kind of get you to linger a little longer when you were shopping in a store. That was part of it as well. Yeah. I mean, music, we almost always have music on in our house unless...

You know, it's night and we're watching, you know, a movie or watching something on TV. But at almost all waking hours, we have music playing in our home and it just feels weird and quiet and not full of life when it's when there's no music happening. Right. It's strange. It can be strange for sure. Should we take a break?

Yeah, we have reached basically the early 70s, which is Muzak's first crisis point. And we'll come back to that after this.

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All right. So I'm born in 1971. And Muzak starts to die a little bit. A little bit. Because a real rock and roller came into the world. That's right. Born with a jean jacket with the Van Halen logo on marker in the back. It did not go away completely, though. It was just sort of...

I guess the beginning of the end, but that didn't mean there wasn't still a business model for Muzak because Muzak was never about its popularity. No, but there was a time where it was popular. Like JFK had it on Air Force One. Eisenhower had it piped into the White House. It was playing on board Apollo 11. Yeah. Like it was everywhere. Like it's really hard to get across that.

how ubiquitous it was, but I found a quote from a guy named Professor Gary Gumpert of Queens College in New York. He said that at the time, Muzak was just kind of amniotic fluid that surrounds us.

It never startles us. It is never too loud. It's never too silent. It's always there. And that was what it was like. You were just kind of moving from one placid bucolic field to the next, going from mall to mall, store to store, elevator to elevator, bus ride to bus ride. It was just absolutely everywhere. So compared to that, the idea that it's

absolutely everywhere, unquestioned. Yeah, it really kind of started to take a bit of a downturn in the 70s, but it just didn't go anywhere yet. It took decades for it to really take a hit. Yeah, I mean, even in the 80s, that was syndicated in 19 countries. There were 80 million people listening, whether or not they wanted to or not, listening to Muzak every day. Yeah. And the company ended up being bought and sold a couple of times over the years.

I think in 81 or in 72, a company called Teleprompter owned it. Yeah. In 81, Westinghouse bought it. And I don't know if I believe this. The story goes that Westinghouse learned later on when they were buying Teleprompter that they owned Muzak and apparently they didn't know that. That's what fundinguniverse.com says. I don't know. I mean, who doesn't?

Maybe back then they didn't do research into purchasing entire corporations. They were on a lot of scotch at the time, man. Although we've had companies that bought

and then they learned that there was a podcast program attached. I think I've heard of that, Things You Should Do or something like that. Yeah, that was actually, that could happen now that I think about it. That's right. Yeah, I kind of actually felt a deeper affinity for Muzak when I learned how many times they've been passed around corporation by corporation. And then I think in the, I think it was, when did Yesco come along? Was that the 90s?

So Jesko was around from the 60s. Well, when they finally came together, though, right? Yeah, but they were an early competitor. I guess a kind of a mid-life competitor to Muzak. But by the 80s, Jesko had established a name for itself by doing basically the opposite of what Muzak did. Rather than making, you know,

covers of canned music without lyrics, they would just go get the licenses of like the hot new song of the, of the moment and,

and play those. And so rather than background music, which is what Muzak's whole jam was, these guys were pioneering foreground music. And they were just this small little outfit from Seattle that, you know, it was kind of like the little engine that could. And they changed the entire landscape, the audio landscape of the United States music.

just by being persistent, by getting that word out that, hey, now foreground's the way to go, not background. That's old stuff. Yeah, and I think that's why today when you go into Publix to do your grocery shopping, you'll hear Christopher Cross singing sailing instead of the Muzak version of sailing. Yeah, can't we just get both, though? Sure. Do we have to choose? I mean, I'm a big Christopher Cross fan. You're not going to find a bigger fan than me. For sure.

For real? You like him that much? Yeah, he's great. I got his two big albums I still have on my shelf. Oh, yeah? Well, he's sitting in the other room at my house right now. Well, I guess you're the bigger fan. Yeah. You're like, no, no, no. He's just tied up. Right. I was going to say, he's not here on his will, under his own will. In fact, you could make a pretty strong case he's here against his will. So in 1984, though, is when Yesco got...

officially involved with Muzak. I think Muzak was, did they actually file for bankruptcy or were they just at that sort of precipice? Not yet. They were teetering right there on the edge. And it was actually, they were bought by the Fields Company, the company that owns Marshall Fields. So Chicago makes another appearance. And the Fields Company said, we like where this Yesco group is going. We're going to merge with them. So Muzak actually merged with Yesco and

the smaller company, but then ended up moving to Seattle right before the grunge movement hit. So Seattle's big musical contribution before grunge was Muzak, basically. I remember seeing that logo. I mean, you probably...

seen the vans around before and really not known. It's that M with the circle around it. Right. I remember when I first saw that, I was like, wait a minute, is that the Muzak? That's, yeah, and that was a big update. They apparently went with some design group, I can't remember the name of it, that just completely reinvented the brand. Yeah.

Because they went from being in the background to manipulating your mood using stimulus progression to this other thing, this new made-up sounding thing called, what's it called? Quantum. Physics. Mechanics. Suicide. Keep guessing. What else? Realm. Leap.

Those are all the quantums I know. There's got to be another one, Chuck, because I'm still looking. I'm so sorry. What the heck is that thing called? It's called Quantum Leap.

We'll just call it quantum leap. Sure. So with this quantum leap thing that they had going on. The bacula effect. Quantum modulation. The bacula effect. Quantum modulation, okay? Oh, okay. I like bacula effect. That's a great one. With quantum modulation, it was...

We are evoking an emotion that is now tied forever to the brand that you're shopping, the store you're shopping in right now. Yeah, yeah, sure. So like this one, so they hire people who make playlists, who curate these playlists that are start to finish. They all share this one theme. They all kind of have this one like cool idea.

Not scary. Super hip. Beachy. You know? Spring break 2008 kind of thing. Whatever. The best. So...

that like a company will, will say, this is, this is what our brand is all about. Give us playlists that fit this. And so now you're, you're kind of like, you, you feel cool because of the music of where you're shopping. And so that makes you want to shop and associate yourself with that place even more. That's what Muzak, that's what the, what's called Neo Muzak is, is all about. That's, that's the current state of affairs in the industry. Yeah.

Yeah, like take – if you want to use Armani Exchange as an example, what they'll do is –

they will literally try and make like a DJ mix that has beat matches and it doesn't break the momentums and it's all crossfaded. Whereas if Ann Taylor calls them up, they don't want to crossfade. They want Celine Dion songs and then a little bit of a small break and then a Sting song coming on. And these gentle fades in and fades out. And, you know, it's the same sort of stuff. It's just curated foreground music. Right. What I love about Muzak is in the end,

When they were finally acquired, they had 1.5 million commercially recorded songs in their catalog.

And they called that The Well. Right. That's amazing. Almost 800 Beatles songs. It is. I think that's why they never fully went under is that catalog kept them commercially viable for sale. Super valuable. It's got to be. Yeah. So they were bought in, I think, 2009 maybe by a group called Mood Music. 2011. 2011. And then two years later, they retired the Muzak name forever. Just couldn't do anything with it.

So now it's Mood Music is the company that owns the well. Mood Media. Okay. They're doing that whole foreground music quantum modulation type thing where, you know, you just associate a brand with a certain kind of music. Like you wouldn't walk into that Armani exchange and hear –

you know, Paul Simon. Yeah, Christopher Cross. You'd be like, something's off here. The mood, what is it, mood media? Their job is to make sure that there's nothing off while you're in that store, that it all just kind of fits together and you feel good about where you're shopping. I don't know though, man. You want to move some Armani gear? Put on You Can Call Me Al. Just watch it fly off the shelves. Man, those kids would freak out.

They're frosted tips with stand up on end. They're like, what is this? This is amazing. I've never felt more alive. Why is Chevy Jason here? Oh, man. A really cool thing, though, is what you were talking about with Muzak being on the tech forefront. Yeah. It's really cool that over the years, they were always early adopters of tech.

And it's funny to think about them that way, but they were always on the leading edge and the forefront of what technology was doing. Yeah, so I don't know if they invented them, but they certainly were early adopters, if not pioneers, in vinyl records. People were not using vinyl at the time. Then they eventually ditched the vinyl records in favor of an electronic brain called Mater M, the number eight and the letter R.

which basically was a big deck of reel-to-reel tapes that had a bunch of different songs on it, but they had different inaudible pulses that would trigger a different one to come on next. So you could curate lists on these huge reel-to-reels. It was just amazing. They were using this thing starting in the 50s.

So the whole thing became kind of automated. They launched their own satellite in the 70s. They had a computer database in the 70s. Like they were very much pioneers and early adopters of a lot of different technology that we take for granted today. Yeah, I mean, you could make an argument that they were doing the Pandora Spotify thing decades before they were doing it. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. And I mean, the whole point of it, too, is virtually unchanged. I mean, it's not necessarily to make you a docile shopper anymore, but it's like they're trying to make you feel like that brand is part of your identity by evoking memories in you using songs to unlock them. Totally. Yeah.

Pretty interesting stuff, man. I'm going to go. What were those two records again? I want to write this down. Okay. One is More Than Music, Period and Environment, 1981 Muzak record that has not just sailing on it, has Olivia Newton-John's Magic and

It has Take Your Time, Do It Right, which I don't care if the lyrics are there or not. If you're sitting next to your mom in a doctor's office and Baby, You Can Do It, Take Your Time, Do It Right comes on, you both know what that song's about. Yeah, yeah. It may even be more uncomfortable in that situation. And then it ends with Funky Town.

Nice. It's a good one. The other one is called The Blue Album. It's a complete stimulus progression album, and it has a bunch of good songs on it, including Orlean's Dance With Me, which is, if you ask me, the Muzak cover is way better than the original. So not to be confused with Weezer's Blue Album.

No, it's a little different. And then if you're like, oh, this music's floating my boat, go start looking up Ronnie Aldrich, Frank Chexfield, Montevani, and just start there. Yeah, and if eventually you're like, I'm feeling really...

Goosey. How about some actual vocalists going on? And then you'll just go right into Josh's other favorite, which is Yacht Rock Easy Listening. I like Yacht Rock a lot, too. I'm super right now into West Coast Cool Jazz. Stan Getz, Chet Baker. Oh, I can't remember his name, but I just got into him. He's a great jazz pianist from that era.

Bill Evans, the Bill Evans trio. Oh, love Bill Evans. You're just getting into Bill Evans? Yeah, I just started getting into him. I started with Chet Baker and just started working my way out. Vince Giraldi is another great one. I know he's known for the Charlie Brown stuff, but all of Vince Giraldi is great. Yeah, he is. You can tell just by the Charlie Brown album that he's an amazing jazz guy. Yeah, good stuff.

So, Chuck, I have one more thing. There is, you know, people hate Muzak a lot. So there's some artists who have like tried to, a lot of artists have tried to make hay out of the whole thing. But one guy, David Schaefer, had something from back in 2000 or 2002 something. He had X10R.1 and X10R.2. These two CDs that he released, they were basically his,

weird, unnerving remixes of Muzak that just turns the whole thing on its head so much so that, like, you may laugh out loud when you first hear them. And I believe they're on his website. But it's like Muzak, but what you would hear in your nightmares. Okay.

Okay. It's really good. And I believe he's got it on his website to go listen to. And I think you can buy the CDs, too. So check that out. I'll check it out. Okay. Well, if you want to know more about Muzak, just start listening and loving. Just don't prejudge. How about that? Great. And since I said don't prejudge everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this from Lauren. Hey, guys.

a man walks down the street and says why am i soft in the middle the rest of my life is so hard oh wait a minute sorry what a perfect email for this one i was reading my forearm tattoo by accident hey guys been listening to stuff you should know for a few years i often turn up the volume and play an episode while i cook dinner my seven-year-old daughter lila used to complain oh you're listening to this again

but I recently caught her singing the beat to the intro music, and she'll casually mention things she's heard from time to time. I suspect she's fond of the animal episodes. Anyway, you'll jokingly sometimes say, Jerry...

Well, you're going to have to edit that part out. And it has me curious how often things are cut from an episode and why. Bad jokes? Too long? Have you ever had to completely redo one? I think it'd be really interesting to know, and I bet Lila would find it encouraging, since she likes to make videos of herself singing and dancing. For the record, y'all make it effortless and seem effortless, and it's always a joy to listen to. That is Lauren from Montevallo, Alabama, saying,

I'll bet that's not how you say that. Montevallo? Yeah, you're probably right. You put a little too much mustard on there. She says, P.S., how cool of a mom would I be if my daughter heard our names on the podcast? Yeah, cool mom. So there you go, Lauren and Lila. The answer is very little gets edited out. Just the singing and dancing. Like that siren in the background? We'll probably just leave that in to prove a point. Just leave that in. No, we don't edit a lot out. Occasionally, like we found out, and we said this before early on,

we left in the word stumbles and the ums and the uhs and just because it's a conversation and we didn't want to make it seem too scripted because it's not or canned because it's not and so we just left that stuff in there and the only time like

I could think today you had to look something up real quick, but that doesn't happen much. Yeah, I had to poke my head out of the studio and look at my record collection that had come up with Bill Evans' name. So, I mean, that's gone now, but very little is edited out, especially after this many years. We're not one-take wonders, but it's... Cherry doesn't have the hardest job in the world, you know? We've taken it easy on her for years. Yeah. Yeah, that's about it, Chuck. I can't think of anything else we really edited out.

But that's not to say that shows that are heavily edited and very kind of scripty and slick, like there's room for those too.

Oh, yeah. We're not the only way to do it. No, we're like the Muzak of podcasts. There's other people who are all like the Ted Nugent of podcasts, and there's room for both. Yeah, like Roman Mars, the Ted Nugent of podcasting. That's right, man. That guy's always wearing like a studded leather wristband and stuff. I keep waiting on Roman to text me and being like, you guys are consistently talking smack about me. He doesn't listen, and no one he knows listens. Oh, that's impossible.

So who is that? Lila and Lauren. Correct. Nice. Well, thank you very much for writing in. Hope we answered your question. And if you want to get in touch with us like Lila and Lauren did, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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