Selects: Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness

26:28And companies bought in, including the U.S. Army. Yeah, I think World War II is basically cited as the moment when Muzak 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.

27:10And think about how many more widgets you could make if your employees don't, you know, slack off productivity wise at 1030 from 1030 to lunch and then from like 230 until they go home. Like imagine if this 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. 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.

27:52And 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. 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. Like, it's not like, you know, Harvard came along and said, yes, we've studied this thoroughly and this is exactly what happens. This is, you know, company claims, but it is intuitively sensible at least.

28:31Well, yeah. I mean, you need only to host a house party 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 it's going to happen. Yeah, everybody's going to shake their groove thing. Everyone's going to shake their groove thing. 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 records.

29:15I 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.

29:55Is that like Enigma? Like Zero Seven and stuff that's, she calls it Ambient Groovy, Just sort of mellow and groovy and like 07 and more Chiba. And it 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. 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.

30:42Maybe 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 space into 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, that it was poking at your brain to get you to do things that you may or may not want to do.

31:47Maybe you will be less likely to punch some guy on the bus because there's Muzak playing, which is a good thing. We should not be punching other people on the bus. But the point 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, though. There was actually a point in time, though, Chuck, 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.

32:32So 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 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, you know, don't rearrange the lyrics with strings.

33:24So Muzak kind of 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, 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.

34:11But 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 it's 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 fill up on 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.

34:50It'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. To where, you know. That's good to say it. Yeah, you don't, like, it's like you were saying at the party.

35:26If 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, to linger a little longer when you were shopping in a store. Um, that was, 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 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 there's no music happening.

36:11Right. 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.

36:37New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast. And every week, we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, this is Dr. Jesse Mills, director of the men's clinic at UCLA Health and host of the Mailroom Podcast.

37:12Each January, guys everywhere make the same resolutions. Get stronger, work harder, fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? To kick off the new year, I sat down with Dr. Steve Poulter, a psychologist with over 30 years experience helping men unpack shame, anxiety, and emotional pain they were never taught to name. In a powerful two-part conversation, we discuss why men aren't emotionally bulletproof, why shame hides in plain sight, and how real strength comes from listening to yourself and to others. Guys who are toxic, they're immature, or they've got something they just haven't resolved.

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39:19All right. So I'm born in 1971. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. Eisenhower had it piped into the White House. It was playing on board Apollo 11.

40:03Yeah. Like it was everywhere. Like, it's really hard to get across 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.

40:50But it just didn't go anywhere yet. It took decades for it to really take a hit. Yeah, I mean, even in the 80s, it 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.

41:28That'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 websites and then they learned there was a podcast program attached. I think I've heard of that, things you should do or something like that. Yeah, actually that could happen now that I think about it. That's right. Yeah, I kind of actually felt a deeper affinity for music 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?

42:05Was that the 90s? So Yesco 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 midlife competitor to Muzak. But by the 80s, Yesco 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 moment 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.

42:56And they changed the entire landscape, the audio landscape of the United States, 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 real? You like him that much? No, he's great. I got his two big albums I still have on my shelf.

43:38Oh, 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 as well. So in 1984, that was 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 Field.

44:16So 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, 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've 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? Yeah, and that was a big update.

44:55They 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. No, keep guessing. What else? Realm. Leap. Nope. 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 quantum leap. We'll just call it quantum leap, sure.

45:39So, 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, not scary, super hip, beachy, you know, spring break 2008 kind of thing, whatever.

46:32The best. so um 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 music that's what the what's called neo music is is all about that's That's the current state of affairs in the industry. Yeah, like 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.

47:14Whereas 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. 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. That catalog kept them commercially viable for sale.

47:54Super valuable. It's got to be. Yeah. So they were bought in, I think, 2009 maybe by a group called Mood Music in Austin. 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?

48:38Their 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 Out and just watch it fly off the shelves. Man, those kids would freak out. Their frosted tips would 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.

49:19And 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 They had a bunch of different songs on it, but they had different inaudible pulses that would trigger a different one to come on next.

49:59So 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. 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. 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.

50:48Totally. 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, it has Olivia Newton-John's Magic, 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. It may even be more uncomfortable in that situation. And then it ends with Funky Town. Nice. It's a good one.

51:30The 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 Orleans Dance With Me, which is, if you ask me, the Muzak covers 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 in 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.

52:12I like Yacht Rock a lot too. I'm super right now into West Coast cool jazz. Stan Getz Chet Baker 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 You can tell just by the Charlie Brown album that he's an amazing jazz guy. Good stuff. So, oh, Chuck, I have one more thing.

52:51There's, 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 that 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. It's really good. And I believe he's got it on his website to go listen to.

53:38And 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.

53:57I'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. I've 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, ugh, 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.

54:29I suspect she's fond of the animal episodes. Anyway, you'll jokingly sometimes say, Jerry, 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. I'll bet that's not how you say that. Montevallo?

55:05Yeah, 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.

55:42And so we just left that stuff in there. And the only time like I 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 to 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 edit 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.

56:24Oh, 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.

56:59and if you want to get in touch with us like Lila and Lauren did you can send us an email send it off to stuffpodcast 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.

57:28I'm John Polk. For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight. You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story. John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be. Listen to Atonement, the John Palk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year and on the podcast Health Stuff we're resetting the way we talk about our health.

58:09Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Dr. Jesse Mills, host of the Mailroom Podcast. Each January, men promise to get stronger, work harder, and fix what's broken. But what if the real work isn't physical at all? I sat down with psychologist Dr. Steve Poulter to unpack shame, anxiety, and the emotional pain men were never taught how to name.

58:49Part of the way through the valley of despair is realizing this has happened, and you have to make a choice whether you're going to stay in it or move forward. Our two-part conversation is available now. Listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.