Muzak is the company that turned background music into an industry, and whose name became shorthand for bland piped sound. It grew from a 1922 patent by the US Army officer George Owen Squier for transmitting music over power lines; his business, Wired Radio, was renamed Muzak in 1934, combining the start of music with the end of Kodak. Its programmes were sold to hotels, restaurants, offices and factories, and became a fixture of lifts.
Muzak’s programming relied on a theory it called stimulus progression: fifteen-minute blocks of music that grew gradually more upbeat to keep workers’ pace up. The company was acquired by Mood Media, which retired the brand in 2013. For experimental music Muzak serves as the counter-model. Brian Eno coined the word ambient for Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) precisely to separate his idea from canned background music, proposing sound that keeps a room’s character and works equally well whether ignored or attended to.