Let's be done with Muzak

The economy isn't whacking only arts non-profits and jazz institutions, it's weeding the garden of music itself. What use do we have, or did we ever have, for Muzak? The eight-decade old company has filed for bankruptcy, and what really is going to come along to save it? Ubiquitous music is not a market niche any more. It's pretty much the default result of technology, marketing and portable entertain-me centers.

So the company that sold us music atmosphere and music productivity enhancement is about to die, and while I don't like to see anyone lose their jobs in tough times, Muzak is expiring from having lived a life of crimes against music, exhibiting willful disregard for the cerebral health of the human race and lethally awful A&R. You see Muzak wasn't just a programmer of existing popular music for communal places, it produced that crap -- tens of thousands of arrangements of  songs (ranging from the great to the horrible) that so completely sucked the life and meaning out of the original compositions that the bands might as well have been out torching libraries. They AIMED to make music less surprising or communicative. Can you imagine being hired to play that dreck in some florescent studio day after day, making original recordings that you knew were going to be pale shadows of "Sailing" or "Ebony and Ivory"? I remember my Dad actually pointing out to me in my impressionable years that what I was hearing in the Kroger or wherever was actually sawed out on violins by some very tired and weak sounding humans. We laughed about it.

I'm not sure if George Owen Squire (and if you can believe it, the name's pronounced 'square'), the founder of the company back in the 1930s can be said to have invented the very idea of music as wallpaper, but he certainly figured out a way to commodify music so malicious in its design as to make even today's FM radio and American Idol seem artist-driven. And just because I'm feeling cantankerous about it, I'll blame him at the same time for laying the groundwork for the Napster calamity. Yeah, it's a stretch, but when you grow up literally surrounded in a commercial-music-everywhere culture, can you really be expected to understand when powerful guys start telling you that music is scarce private property?

Comments

[J]

You case would probably be significantly more compelling if you had your facts in order. Sure, in the early days, stringed cover tunes were the norm for the company, but in recent history their content has been and currently is original artists. They have over 2 million original artist songs in their library and assemble "play lists" designed to help retailers, hoteliers and dining venues from fast to fine express their unique brands to their customers. I have been a customer of both their programming and their Voice messaging services for years and I have been a supplier of high-end commercial loudspeakers to their business for 15 years. I hope they get through this and emerge even stronger.

My guess is that at some point you were out and about shopping or dining and found yourself getting into a song, possibly even found your foot tapping, and more often than not, Muzak was the provider of that song.

Perhaps you should also take into consideration their Heart & Soul Foundation before you get so giddy over their demise. With hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to needy school music programs, extensive “Noise” camps each year and their other music related educational activities Muzak would be missed. The company is about music and making sure it is around for our children and beyond. The royalties they pay would certainly be missed as well.

If anything needs to go, it is probably the name as it is too ubiquitous and generic and harkens back to their early days while not successfully extolling their creative and cutting edge products and services.

Rock on…..

[Lawrence Warner]

Craig you've read this article yes? David Owen, "Annals of Culture: The Soundtrack of Your Life," New Yorker, April 10, 2006:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/10/060410fa_fact

BTW I just posted a link to your Krauss-Plant piece on their Facebook fanpage. Hope you don't mind!

[B.]

I'm late to this Muzak party, but just wanted to make this observation about Muzak and way "background music" services affected how our system values music. An add-on to your "groundwork for Napster" argument.

I first thought about Muzak in any serious way well more than a decade ago, when I listened to the company's then-lobbyist, Jon Potter, explain why it was fair that users of music for "background" purposes pay lower public performance fees to the music composers and publishers, than do other public performance licensees. It's just background, no one's fully paying attention, etc.

Yet, if you consider the "music architect" work discussed in the New Yorker article, where sophisticated psychological profiling is used to select music that can successfully shape a business's customer base and customer behavior patterns (by attracting the preferred customer types, discouraging the unwanted types, causing people either to linger or move through quickly based on the business's preferences, etc.), you could make a good case that this "background" use is often even more valuable to the user than many "regular" public performance uses. Yet, the concept was, Muzak and its background music customers should get to use this music at a significant discount, because it is "just" background.

Fast-forward a few years to 1998, when the National Restaurant Association, NFIB & other "background" music users succeed in winning passage of the Fairness in Music Licensing Act, exempting many bars and restaurants (those < 3700 sq. ft.) and retail stores (those < 2000 sq. ft.) from paying any performance royalties at all, for public performances involving music via radio or TV.

So perhaps Muzak, which long profited from devaluing music, in the official assessment of what it should cost, has found that even with its discounted licensing cost, it can't successfully compete against "free", which is what the Fairness in Music Licensing Act achieved for so many of Muzak's natural customers.

I have no idea the extent to which this development played a role in Muzak's decline, but there's some poetic justice in it, if it did.