SlowpokeBlog

In response to my earlier post, "Where Has All the Muzak Gone?", reader Russ in NYC emailed me a fascinating New Yorker article about the Muzak corporation, which is still very much alive and well. I didn't even realize there was a Muzak corporation; like most people, I assumed it was merely the term for elevator music.

The syrupy orchestral "elevator music" that most people associate with the company scarcely exists anymore. Muzak sells about a hundred prepackaged programs and several hundred customized ones, and only one-"Environmental"-truly fits the stereotype. It consists of "contemporary instrumental versions of popular songs," and it is no longer terribly popular anywhere, except in Japan. ("The Japanese think they love it, but they actually don't," a former Muzak executive told me. "They'll get over it soon.") All of Muzak's other programs are drawn from the company's huge digital inventory, called the Well, which contains more than 1.5 million commercially recorded songs, representing dozens of genres and subgenres-acid jazz, heavy metal, shag, neo-soul, contemporary Italian-and is growing at the rate of twenty thousand songs a month...

The music you hear while shopping at the Gap or Old Navy has been carefully programmed by Muzak's "audio architects." Which, as my correspondent points out, may seem a bit Orwellian -- but, ironically enough, involves a bit more loving care and talent than goes into most commercial FM radio programming these days.