A lot of interesting stuff in this New Yorker article by David Owen.

Muzak, if you haven’t heard already, no longer sells “elevator music.” It’s now in the business of packaging real music for replaying in retail stores. When you’re in Gap or Old Navy, for example, the songs you hear played are Muzak tracks.

The article gives the history of that transition.

The piece features an interview with Dana McKelvey, “audio architect.” She picks tracks and assembles them so they’ll convey the mood corporations want evoked by music played in their stores. The audio architecture concept was conceived by one Alvin Collis, who was doing an engineering job for Muzak.

He told me, “I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, ‘Let’s put on a show.’  It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’y really about selling music. It was about selling emotion — about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.” 

Since I live in Rochester, New York, it was also interesting to come across a tidbit about how the company got its name: it was originally called Wired Radio, but in 1934 changed its name to Muzak. Its inspiration: George Eastman’s “Kodak.”