Music on the way down

Sukumar Ranganathan — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:49:00 GMT

A news story on Bloomberg last week said Muzak Holdings LLC, the company behind elevator music is seeking bankruptcy protection .
Muzak, for those who came in late is to piped music in public places what Xerox is to the copying business.
The music itself, ~~always~~ almost always instrumental (and associated with being instrumental, although as one justifiably indignant reader has pointed out, they moved into original music sometime in the 1990s), has become synonymous with sanitised and boring background melodies that play in airports, restaurants, even retail outlets.
One school of thought had it that the music actually encourages people to shop. The New Yorker had an interesting article on this a few years ago .
Elevators (or lifts, since we are Indians and speak the Queen's language) here also play music but there is no Muzak equivalent in the country.
A person in the lift business tells me that his company just sends a CD, preferably instrumental, and preferably with lots of flutes and lots of violins, to local mechanics who record it on to a chip and then wire it into an elevator's controls.
No copyrights are obtained, he adds.
Then, there are those elevators that simply announce what they are doing (this lift is going up; Four: stay away from the doors).

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A Daily Download : Muzak

Music on the way down