Hey, there, everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen our twenty twenty one episode on Musak. And you might ask, who could possibly like the noisome, omnipresent annoyance that was Musak? Well me, I like Muzak. So there. But if you're not over forty, you might not even know that there was a time you couldn't
step out in public from department stores. Those are in something we call malls to elevators without smalltzy string arrangements of pop music pummeling you with their saccharine sound, and you know what, you're the worst offtware not having experienced it. Instead, you can experience this episode, and I hope you enjoy it.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w You, Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Dave. See Coustin. I said it right this time.
I thought it was Coustain.
No, if you're in France, that's how you would say it. But here in the United States, you say Coustin.
Can I start this off by saying something, Oh.
Boy, I'm worried about what you're going to say about.
Okay, well, this episode is on muzak, and I started thinking last night. I was thinking about your love of musak, which is not at all ironic.
Not in the least, but you can't say that kind of thing these days. People don't believe you.
I know it's true everyone. I know Josh very well, and I was thinking of your and I like all kinds of music too, but you know, at my heart, I'm a rock and roll guy. Sure, And I was thinking about your top musical genres that are above rock and roll, and you're picking order, not in order. I counted easy listening, musak, disco, art rock, crowd rock, and I probably missed a couple.
Crowd rock is below rock and roll. I want to like crowdrock, it just doesn't quite jibe with me. I like some, but not all of it.
And then stuff I think art rock because it's just sort of that avant garde, like I don't you don't love Yoko, but you certainly are a bit of a Yoko apologist. Sure, Grace Jones stuff like that, But I.
Love Grace Jones for sure. What about talking heads? They go in there too, right, they'd probably be. I mean they literally went to art school together.
Yeah, I mean they kind of span from art rock to new wave to like world music by the time they finished.
Yeah, yeah, I know, but uh yeah.
I mean, I certainly love the Talking Heads, but all of those, for you are above good old fashioned rock and roll.
I think, Yeah, you also left out nineties tech noo. I've been listening to a lot of that accutely too, like Alternate and the Prodigy and everything.
But you love music, you really do.
I do too.
Actually, I don't know, so I don't know how much I like. I will listen to some of that stuff and we'll talking about we'll talk about emo in here, of course, old sourpust Brian Eno, but I love listening to his ambient stuff, which he sort of wrote as an antidote to music. Again. We'll talk about that more later. But I do like in certain circumstances that music thing is really great to have on in my house as background music, and it's sorts that same purpose.
One of the big reasons why too, is because you can get stuff done with it. Like lyrics can be so distracting, they just latch onto your brain and say no, no, pay attention to me. I'm I'm talking to you now. Music does the opposite of that. It says, go be free, but also enjoy this, Like there's there's like a whole part of your brain that music can tap into that doesn't require your conscious thought, but it still produces like
good feeling. And you know, like Peo, people just smack music around like it's just it's so bland and it's so soulless, and I totally disagree with that. Like if you actually stop and listen to music, it's really really technically proficient. It's frequently well done. It's often very clever
and creative and inventive, which is really saying something. Because you're doing this when they in the confines of covering an existing song in a way that makes it familiar and easy to recognize but also takes away any intrusiveness that it might have. It's tough to do. And I really, I just I love music. You're absolutely right, Like I
listened to music this whole time. Yeah, not just when we were when we were researching music today, but also when I was researching the Havana syndrome, and I realized, like this is my normal thing. This is the same stuff I listen to when I'm researching anyway.
Yeah, and we can go ahead and dispell a couple of or not myths, but clear up a couple of things right off the bat. First of all, Musak is a name brand, and people can kind of collectively use the term music or have collectively use that term for what's called like potted plant music or elevator music or shopping music. But it is actual actually a brand name, which we'll get to the history of. And then the
second thing is it gets the name elevator music. Part of the myth is that people said, well, they put it on elevators because people were afraid to death of elevators early on, and it calmed people down, or it covered up the noise of the clanking elevators.
I'd never heard that before. You.
Yeah, neither one of those things are true. Total myth. My guess is that it was played on elevators, and because you're in such a closed little box that's usually quiet, it just was way more noticeable than like in a big office full of people working. So people call the elevator music.
That's my guess, right, Yeah, I mean, yeah, there wasn't music gone elevators before? Before several decades in the twentieth century, Like, there weren't many elevators you could get on because people didn't have elevators in their house. It was a public building you were in where they weren't playing music of some form very frequently music.
That Great Blues Brothers scene, Yeah, yeah.
Because they're they're going up to what the Cook County Assessor's office and the like. There there's the entire Chicago Police Department is after them, but they're forced to get on this elevator and the girl from Ipanema is playing.
I think my favorite part of that scene is there's just dozens and hundreds of cops and swat guys just you know, hut when they're repelling and doing all this stuff. And then there's the one shot of the lone guy repelling down the side of the building and he's by himself just going hut.
Yeah.
That's a good one, so funny.
There's another scene from around the era a few years later from Airplane two where it's like ripped Torn. I believe it's Ripped Torn. The party from the Larry Sanders Show. Yeah, yeah, and I don't know the other guy he's talking to. But anyway, they're walking and talking and they have to get on an elevator and the elevator door opens and it's just blaring, like ear drum shattering decibel MacArthur Park
and they have to get on. People are coming off the elevator like with their hands and their ears like with splitting headaches from this. But it's just completely the opposite way elevator music's supposed to be like. But it's a good little scene too, as far as elevator music goes well.
I mean that's kind of one of the points too, is Musak has long been a movie trope and a TV trope and then been lampooned and scenes just like the Blues brother scene where there's something chaotic going on and then you cut back to the sound of Musaic playing wherever the other scene is setting. Right, Yeah, very very fun stuff.
But that's started, a guess it started with The Blues Brothers, which came out in nineteen eighty, But before that that was like Musak was not really lampoon I mean, not everybody liked it. It really kind of started to get a little backlash in the late sixties early seventies, as we'll see, but there was a very significant chunk of the twentieth century again from maybe nineteen fifty to nineteen eighty.
We'll say where everywhere you went in public, including if you took a Greyhound bus, or if you were on a plane, or you happened to be an Air Force one, or you were at the mall, in an elevator at your office, everywhere muzak was playing. There was musach playing everywhere. It was just a part of life that you was inescapable.
Actually. Yeah, so let's go back in time and talk about the inventor of muzak. And this is sort of a fun fact of muzak. The man's name is George Square. It is spelled Squire, but he swears it's pronounced square.
I'm really impressed, man, I had not come up with.
That one or he swore it was pronounced square. Yeah, this is kind of one of the funny jokes, like the guy who invented mus x was Square. But Major General George Square was born in eighteen sixty five, if you believe that, And he is just a laundry list of accomplishments as a human being. He was he earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in electrical science. He was an Army engineer with a PhD. I think the first one. Yeah, and he was I believe the lead Signal Corps officer for the Army as well.
He was. He also was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, which connects this episode to the other one today. That's right, because he came up with something called a tree telephone. He figured out how to use any tree, but preferably one with fully leaved I guess, I don't know what you'd call that as a as a receiver and transmitter for radio signals. He figured out how to use a tree, a living tree for that.
He was. Here's another fun fact. He was one of the first airplane passengers ever because he was way into human flight and got together with the Wright brothers and a nineteen oh six, consulted with them, and they said, hey, why don't you take a ride in our new little biplane. You'll probably live right.
I looked at our I looked at the document for our Wright Brothers episode, and he did not appear. I don't think we mentioned him, but he might. He might have been the first airline passenger from what I saw.
Yeah, where he really made a big name for himself pre Musaic was this invention, which is what we call multiplexing, which is he figured out or maybe wire wireless communications, which is something he worked on with the Army. He basically figured out how to get multiple uses out of single telephone lines. Telephone wires were you know, there are only so many, so you were really limited as to what you could do with them and how many people
could use them. So he basically figured out a way to increase their output and efficiency by multiplexing and by sending super imposing high frequency radio signals over those low frequency telegraph signals, basically just allowing you to use the wire at the same time, the same wire.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's like, if you think of like a wave, if it's low frequency, there's big, wide gaps in between. You can fit a higher frequency that's tighter and squished together in those gaps, and but you're still using the same line. And you know, this was the guy who came up with that. That's an enormous advancement in telecommunications that were still put in use today in some applications, but definitely helped like the early Internet along.
It was just a huge contribution to humanity, like forget even just music, like just that alone would would probably warrant like an episode for George Square.
Yeah, and I think he was like, everyone should be able to use this, So I'm going to open source it and everyone can use this new multiplexing technology. AT and T came along and said, we'll use it, and then you know what, you've stole it from us.
Actually right, he came up with it, but since he left it open, they decided to just take it from him and sue him for it.
I think he sued them, but it didn't work.
That's right, you're right, so he but he still was able to use this wire wireless technology with multiplexing. And at the time people were starting to get into radio broadcasts. But radio wireless radio like that you would just have in your house. It's picking up radio waves at a station that was not widespread at the time. So George Square said, you know what, I understand people want music in their house. I'm going to give it to them.
I'm going to use that multiplexing technology and I'm going to run sound waves over the electrical wires that go into the house, and I'm going to sell this it is brilliant. I'm going to sell this service to people's homes for a dollar fifty a month, about twenty dollars today, and it's just part of your utility bill because it's
coming in through your electrical company. And there's actually a section of Cleveland called the Lakewood I believe Lakewood area that was the pilot for this wired wireless radio that George Square invented. The problem was is, by the time they deployed it, wireless radio was already a thing, and so we had this really great idea that just no longer had an application.
Yeah, he was. He basically invented the first music subscription service exactly.
Yeah. And he had multiple channels too, Like when you subscribed, you got news, you got dance music. There was like I think three different channels you could choose.
From Howard Stern.
Yep, Howard Stern was on back.
Then Baba Boobie. So he had that technology though, and he said, you know what, this is a good idea, though maybe I can think of how to use this in offices and stores. And in nineteen thirty four he looked up at Kodak, very successful corporation and said, I love that name, and I love music. Let's just call it music and history changed and maybe we should take a break.
Okay, let's do it all right, We'll be right back. So, in the parlance of today, Chuck George Square and his Musak Corporation pivoted from home consumer markets to business markets. And that just knocked it out of the park because it turned out that there were a lot of companies, hotels, restaurants, clubs. I think the Stork Club was an early customer that said, you know what, it's really going to make our place seem fancy if we've got music piping in all the time.
So yes, we would like to sign up for your service. And that's really where music kind of started to take off.
Yeah, so Musak, I mean we haven't even said what it is, surely people know, but muzak are instrumental tracks. And you did mention that there were no vocals, so we kind of hinted the big one. Yeah, but there are instrumental tracks that are cover songs of kind of anything you can think of. I mean that have hearts, some music of some heavy rock. It can be classical music, it can be old standards. But the point is they are instrumental versions that are re recorded. They don't just
take the vocals out. It's not carry oukay style, right, It is re record arranged and recorded by professional, really good musicians orchestras. Sometimes, Yeah, and it is, that's what it is, and it's great the end.
And very very frequently it's it's made into a much more mellow version of itself, Like any rough edges are taken off. Since they take the vocals out, it's not like there's no there that vocal melody is non existing any longer. They just replace it with something else. So if they're trying to go for something like a little more upbeat or up tempo, they'll replace the vocals with,
say like a saxophone. If they're trying to do something a little more mellow, they'll replace the vocals with a string section.
Or harp perhaps.
Yeah. That's one of the things that that musaic is very famous for, is like what's called masses of strings, just strings upon strings. In fact, one of the early I guess big name groups that produced musak was called one hundred and one Strings. They probably were absolutely accurate in that, like there's just a lot tons of strings everywhere, violins, cello's violas, every string instrument you can throw at it. They just layer upon layer in these songs. It's one of the hallmarks of musak.
Yeah, and there are many versions of Antonio Carlos Shobiam's Go from Epanima, but the music version is one of the most popular, and that one hundred and one strings
version is the most ubiquitous from that lot. I do encourage people to go watch the YouTube though, of Frank Sinatra and Joe Beim singing that song live on TV, because it's great and every way they're just sitting next to each other, and the shot isn't wide at first, and they're just sort of singing back and forth to each other and Frank Stone is saying, then it cuts to the wide and Frank is like totally kicked back with his legs crossed with a cigarette in his hand,
exactly like you would hope. But he looks like, I mean, it looks like he just not rolled out of bed because he's put together, but he looks like he rolled from his wicker bag to his wicker chair right for this performance.
Can I get some cocaine in here? Baby?
So it's Joe Piscopos, Frank Sinatra.
Do you ever listen to Joe beam stuff?
Oh yeah, dude, I love that old lounge stuff. It's really great Brazilian stuff.
Yeah. His record Stone Flower is just a masterpiece from beginning to end.
Yeah. But that's a good party music.
Yeah. That's another thing though too. It's like it's so mellow that to take that kind of music and then make it into musak is like it's almost like it takes a certain amount of audacity, Like I was listening to I found so there's want to I want to point people the two different music records that are on YouTube. One is called More Than Music, Period and Environment. It's a nineteen eighty one musak record and it has a version of Sailing Christopher Crosses Sailing.
One of the most area music sleep.
Yeah exactly. They figured out how to basically make you lose control of your bladder listening to this exactly. Yeah, that's a good one. And then the other one is called the Blue Album, uh, and it is from nineteen seventy four, I believe, And it's just both of them are really great. That's good good introductions to musaic if you're not into it already, all right.
So music is trucking along in the thirties. They get to the forties and they think, you know what, we need a better way to sell this stuff and to pitch this to businesses and corporations. So why don't we hire some people to research music and to figure out what kinds of music keep people happy and working? And because people, you know, they work hard in the morning, and then they sort of lag a bit before lunch, and then they really lag sort of a couple of
hours after lunch. So why don't we do this? So why don't we study it? Let's call it stimulus progression. It's a bit pseudoscience. It makes sense it is in that it's not been proven. It makes sense to everyone who I feel like knows about it, Like sure, music can pick you up and make you work harder, But it's pseudoscience in that it's I don't think it's ever been scientifically proven.
I gotcha, okay, yeah, because I keep seeing it just like dismissed as pseudoscience. But then there were plenty of early studies that were done by legitimate industrial psychologists and other like efficiency experts, that kind of thing that showed that there really was a significant like improvement and productivity or less sick days, that kind of stuff in places that have musaic compared to places that didn't have music pumped into the office.
Yeah, I think maybe they're specific claims about a work day. Okay, might have been a little I mean everywhere I read said it was basically not a marketing scam, but a marketing tool that they kind of invented.
I gotcha. But so one thing to say about this we're going to talk about it in a second stimulus progression, is that they did kind of plow money that they were making. We're making a lot of money starting in the late forties early fifties, they plowed it back into research to basically come up with scientific evidence to back up their claims, which you can really kind of see the ghost of George Square still looming over the company,
you know, this decade or so after he died. That it's always been this kind of science interested, if not science based company that's also been an early adopter of technology, as we'll see.
Yeah, I mean that is certainly fair. It was never just like, hey, we're just going to play a bunch of what people might consider droll background music, like they really did. I think I don't think it was a scam. I think they really did try to study working environments.
And what they did with his stimulus progression was they divided the work day into fifteen minute increments and basically set a DJ playlist every fifteen minutes, and they assigned a stimulus value from one to six, one being really really mellow, six being you know, super up. And they basically went through and almost like a Pandora sort of curated playlist type of thing to get people to work hard and efficiently throughout a day, and companies bought in, including the US Army.
Yeah, I think we're World War two is basically cited as the moment when music 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 fifties, they started to spread more
and more to even smaller and smaller companies. And it was this idea that if you played music and music'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, and think about how many more widgets you could make if your employees don't, you know, slack off productivity wise at ten, from ten thirty to lunch, and then from like two thirty 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 it's just an 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 fifteen minute increment would kind of go up in tempo, and then you'd have a fifteen minute break of silence,
and then the music would come back on again. But then this fifteen 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 fifteen minutes, And so all of a sudden, next thing, you know, you're making whidge. It's like a maniac because you're being manipulated by this 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.
Well. Yeah, I mean you need only to host house party and play music yourself to determine how music can affect the mood of a group of people. Put on groove is in the heart, and you know what's gonna happen.
Yeah, everybody's gonna shake their groove thing.
Everyone's gonna shape their group thing, shake their group thing. If you put in old sour pus. 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 you know momentarily sure.
I mean I love that record, and I love a lot of his stuff, including his ambient music experimental records. I 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 lund No. They have an album, like a double album called life Forms, and it's it's about as amazing as ambient gets. So you should check that one out.
Embly, Emily got me into ambient I call her Embly 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. Is that like like zero seven and you know, stuff that's she calls it ambient groovy, just sort of sort of mellow and groovy and like zero seven 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 the Future Sign of London stuff is normally at a little more you know, it's super cerebral and intelligent, but it's also fairly dancy. Life Forms is way it's probably their most ambient stuff around.
So Ino though, let's get back to him. He kind of came up with this as an as an antidote to music, right.
Yes, if you like ambient music, you better thank your lucky stars for muzak because we're not for muzak. You might not have ambient music, at least not now. Maybe it would becoming fifty years from now, who knows.
Yeah, he said, I loved that. In this article, it says, as reported by Red Bull Music, Eno said this, and this was I think for the liner notes actually to airport or music for airports. Whereas can 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 musak is not even just necessarily the syrupiness of the music itself, but the intent behind the music. That it was always intended to basic manipulate your mood into making you a better worker, a more docile consumer. That it was poking at your brain to again to get you to do things that you may or may not want to do. Maybe you will be less likely to punch some guy on the bus because
there's musac playing, which is a good thing. We should not be punching other people on the bus. But the point is that 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 musak and popular music were basically one and the same.
Yeah, that was sort of I mean, one of the heydays of musac certainly was in that. When you know, when Glen the Glenn Miller Orchestra was pop music on the radio. Music wasn't a far stretch from some of that stuff, so it was sort of all one and the same. I think it was as that as styles changed and the sixties and seventies start rolling along, that musaic 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. The society just changed between the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties. It just abruptly changed. But that doesn't fully explain why musaic just was suddenly looked down upon. A good explanation I saw is that lyrics became really really important in the late sixties. People had something to say, and music
does not include lyrics. It completely undermines the point of music if you put lyrics in, or don't you know, don't rearrange the lyrics with strings. So music kind of couldn't 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 think do that. I think it's interesting. They could have had a really mellow singer at a certain point come in and they 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 MUSAK or any of its competitors. But Paul Simon I saw, said he always knew he had a hit when he heard a musaic version of it like at the mall or something like that, which it's kind of like weird Al covering Nirvana, Like 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 uh And we'll get to that. But very famously sort of offered to buy music when they fill upon 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 musicified.
It's got yeah, you'd have to play 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 music. It's it's one of the the I don't know if it was a slogan of the Musaic Corporation or not, but they basically said that they fill in the awkward pauses in life m to where it's, yeah, you don't like It's like you were saying at the party, if 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 lose kate 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 Musak, and then also to kind of get you to linger a little longer when you were shopping in a store 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, you know, a movie or watching something on TV. But it almost all waking hours we have music playing in our home, and it just feels weird and quiet and not full of life when it's when there's no music happening, Right, It's strange. It can be strange for sure. Should we take a break?
Yeah, we're we have reached basically the early seventies when it is Musak's first crisis point, and we'll come back to that after this.
All right, So I'm born in nineteen seventy one, and muzak starts to die a little bit because a real rock and roller came into the world.
That's right, born with a gene 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 musak because music was never about its popularity.
No, but there was a time where it was popular. Like JFK had it on Air Force one, Eisenhower had it piped into the White House, it was playing on board Apollo eleven. Yeah, like it was 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.
Nice.
He said that that at the time, music 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 seventies, but it just didn't go anywhere yet. It took decades for it to really take a hit. Yeah.
I mean even in the eighties, that was syndicated in nineteen countries. There were eighty million people listening, whether or not they wanted to or not, listening to music every day. Yeah, And the company ended up being bought and sold a couple of times over the years. I think in eighty one or in seventy two, a company called Teleprompter owned it, Yeah, and eighty one 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 music, and apparently they didn't know that.
That's what funding Universe dot Com says.
I don't know, I mean, who doesn't. Maybe back then they didn't do research into purchasing entire corporations, but 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, that was 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 was when did Yesco come along? Was that the nineties?
So Yesco was around from the sixties.
Well when they finally came together though, right.
Yeah, but they were early competitor, no, I guess that kind of a mid midlife competitor to Musak. But by the eighties Yesco had established a name for itself by doing basically the opposite of what Musak 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 of the moment and play those and so rather than background music, which is what Musac's
whole jam was, these guys were pioneering foreground music. And they were just a small little outfit from Seattle that you know. It was kind of like the little engine that could. And they changed the entire landscape 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 publics to do your grocery shopping, you'll hear Christopher Cross singing sailing instead of the music 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.
He's great. I got his two big albums I still have on my shelf.
Oh yeah, well he's sitting in the other room at my house right now.
I guess you're the bigger fan. Yeah, you're like, no, no, no, he's just tied up.
Well, I was gonna say he's not here on his will and his own will. In fact, you could make a pretty strong cases here against his will.
But so in nineteen eighty four of those when Yesco got officially involved with Musak. I think Muzak was did they actually file for bankruptcy or were they just at that sort of Mount 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. So 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 Musak 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 Musak exactly.
I remember seeing the I remember seeing that logo. I mean you'd 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 Musac that's it?
Yeah, And that was a big update. They apparently went with some design group I can't remember the name of it that just completely invented the brand because they went from being in the background to manipulating your mood using stimulus progression to this other thing, this new sound made up sounding thing called what's it called quantum physics mechanics. So keep guessing what else?
Realm leap? Those are all the quantums.
I know there's got to be another one, Chuck, because I'm still looking. Sorry, is that thing called it's called it's quantum leap? What was this called it? Quantum leap? Sure, So with this quantum leap thing that they had going on, the Bacula effect, quantum modulation, the Bacula effect, quantum modulation. Okay, 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 this the brand that you're shopping, your store, you're shopping and yeah, yeah, sure, so like this 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, uh, super hip, beachy, you know, spring Break two thousand and eight, whatever, the best, So 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 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 musak, That's what
the what's called neo musak is all about. That's that's the current state of affairs and the industry.
Yeah, like take 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 with that has beat matches and it doesn't break the momentums and it's all cross faded. Whereas if Ann Taylor calls them up, they don't want a cross fade. They want Selene 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 as just curated foreground music. What I love about music is in the end, when they were finally acquired, they had one point five million commercially recorded songs in their catalog and they call that the Well, that's amazing, almost eight hundred Beatles songs it is.
I think that's why they never fully went under is that catalog kept them commercially viable for sale.
Super valuable. It's got to be.
Yeah. So they were bought and I think two thousand and nine maybe by a group called Mood Music twenty eleven, and then two years later they retired the music name forever just couldn't do anything with it. So now it's Mood Music is the company that owns the well. But they're doing that whole four 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 would walk into that Armani Exchange and hear you know, Simon yeah, Christopher Cross, You'd be like, something's off here? The mood mood what is it? Mood media? Their their 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 you want to move some Harmoni gear put on, you can call me out. Just it fly off, man.
Those kids would freak out there. Their frosted tips would stand up on and.
Then and then 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 Musaic being on the tech forefront. It's really cool that over the years they were always early adopters of tech, and 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 they 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 real the real 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. You
could curate lists on these huge reel to reels. It was just amazing. They were using this thing starting in the fifties, so the whole thing became automated. They launched their own satellite in the seventies. They had a computer database in the seventies. Like they were very much pioneers and early adopters of a lot of different technology that we take for granted today.
Yeah, I mean that you could make an argument that they were doing the Pandora Spotify think decades before they were doing it.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean the whole point of it too, was 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. Totally 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 nineteen eighty one musak record that has not just sailing on It has Olivia Newton John's Magic 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. You know it may even be more uncomfortable in that situation, and then it ends
with funky Town Nice. It's a good one. The 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 Orlean's Dance with Me, which is, if you ask me, the musaic covers way better than the original.
So not to be confused with Weezer's Blue Album.
No, that's a little different. And then if you're like, oh, it's music's floating my boat, go start looking up Ronnie Aldrich, Frank Checksfield, Montevanni, and just start 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.
I like yacht rock a lot too. I'm super right now into West Coast cool jazz. Stan Getz chet Baker. Yeah, oh, I can't remember. 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 just started getting into him. I started with Chet Baker and just started working my way out.
Vincecaraldi is another great one. And I know he's known for the Charlie Brown stuff, but all of Vincecaraldy is great.
Yeah, he is. You can tell just by the Charlie Brown album that he's an amazing jazz good stuff. So, Chuck, I have one more thing. There's you know, people hate music a lot, so there's some artists who have like tried to a lot of artists have tried to make hey out of the whole thing. But one guy, David Schaeffer, had something from back in two thousand or two thousand
and two something. He had X ten R Dot one and X ten R Dot two, these two CDs that he released that were basically his weird unnerving remixes of Musak 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 a it's like Musak, 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 and I think you can buy the CDs too, so check that out.
We'll check it out.
Okay, Well, if you want to know more about Musak, just start listening and loving. Just just don't prejudge. How about that? And since I said don't prejudge everybody, that means it's time for listener male.
I'm gonna 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, been listening to stuff you should know for a few years. Off and turn up the volume and play an episode while I cooked dinner. My seven year old daughter Lila used to complain, oh, 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.
I suspect she's fond of the animal episodes. Anyway, you'll jokingly sometimes say Jerry, well, you have to edit that. You're gonna 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 Lilah would find it encouraging since she likes to make videos of herself singing and dancing for the record, y'all make it effortless and see effortless and it's always a joy to listen to. That is Lauren from Montablo, Alabama, and she said, yes that. Yeah, you're probably right.
You put a little too much mustard on there.
She says, ps, how cool if a mom would I be if my daughter heard her names on the podcast?
Yeah? Cool?
So there you go, Lauren and Lilah. 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 into proven leave that in.
No, we don't edit a lot out occasionally, like we found out when we said this before. Early on, we left in the words stumbles and the ums and the uzz 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. And so we just left that stuff in there. And the only time, like 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 to Evans name.
So I mean that's gone now, but very little is edit it out. It's especially after this many years. It's we're not one take wonders, but it's Cherry doesn't have the harness 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 added out.
But that's not to say that shows that are heavily edited and varies kind of scripty and slick, like there's a room for those two. Oh yeah, we're not the only way to do it now.
We're like the Musac of podcasts. There's other people who are all like the Ted NuGen of podcasts, and there's room for both.
Yeah, like Roman Mars, the Ted NuGen of podcasting.
That's right, man, that guy's always wearing like a studded leather wrist band 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 listens. 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, and if you want to get in touch with us, like Lila and Lauren did, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.