The Day the Muzak Died
Not really paying attention, I idly sat waiting for the clock to strike 7 p.m. Coming down to lighter news segments of the night (you know, the ones about new health crazes, the third shot back to the weatherman standing in the cold, and the tired, meaningless banter between anchors), my jaw dropped as What’s-His-Name absently smiled into the camera and read the following statement:
“… It was announced today that Muzak Holdings LLC has filed for bankruptcy. Muzak is most known from their invention of elevator music …”
That was it. A measly, 10-second sound byte.
It was shocking to hear that financial demise could befall something as common and widely known as muzak. I guess I had never thought of muzak as a tangible thing, connected to an organization or to stocks or to the economy. Muzak was always something you just instinctively knew about, perhaps chuckled at, but always recognized and acknowledged for its seniority and roots in the world of sound. Sure, a lot of people hate ‘piped music’, especially when it was such a prevalent and bombarding thing in shops, department stores, hotels, and restaurants all over, but its significance is much more than an annoyance in your ear.
The creation of the Muzak system, way back in the 1920s, was a technological revolution: the ability to transmit sound without radio technology. Through studies of psychology, people learned about what kinds of sounds could sway the state of mind — calm, relax, stimulate, whatever. It was the birth of background music, and perhaps, even could be considered the predecessor of ambient music. Today, listeners can access a wide rage of muzak channels via satellite systems. Anything from “Moodscapes” to “City Lights” to the classic “Environmental” sound can be piped in to your car, home, or workplace. You see, muzak has been a part of musical evolution, even though a lot of us had stopped listening. So, how could something so deeply rooted, so archetypal, be reduced to earnings and losses, reduced to a blip on the world’s speeding-train-headed-to-hell failing economy?
To be fair to that particular journalist who decided that this news item didn’t warrant much more than a sneeze-worth of time, muzak as a concept will live on, it’s just the corporation that’s going belly up. Even so, it is disheartening. 2009 marked both Muzak’s 75th anniversary and its downfall. While the company scrambles to keep things afloat, the future looks uncertain. It seems the soundtrack of muzak’s life may be winding down to its last, soothing tune. And wouldn’t that be the saddest sound of all?
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