The Must-Stash

Remember Muzak … that pabulumous, insipid version of music most associated with elevators? I recall an SNL skit where Sting gets stuck on an elevator listening to a Muzak version of Roxanne, only to find out his deal with the devil (John Lovitz) is up and he’s going to be on that elevator for eternity.

Anyway, sometime after the eighties elevators got slightly better music, and malls sometimes got good music … the kind that might put a little extra bounce in your step. This article from the Miami Herald sheds a little light on why:

As the company shifted its focus to retail settings and from workers to consumers, it still touted the power of its music to influence human behavior. A host of studies, some financed by the company, suggested background music encouraged consumers to spend more time in stores and made them feel less crowded while they shopped and less antsy while they waited to pay.

By the late ’80s, Muzak was customizing its product to individual companies. It was a natural move in an era when firms like Nike were learning that the images and ideas of their brands had as much or more value than the things they sold.

There’s also a little bit of the Pandora phenomenon (aka Music Genome Project) happening here with their musicology:

Every song in the Muzak catalog is analyzed for about 80 different parameters like harmony, melody and rhythm, and for hard-to-measure qualities such as lyrical content and whether the vocals float on top of the music or tend to get buried.

Just as the ubiquity of digital cameras has brought the third wave of democratization in photographic (the first being the Brownie and the second being the Polaroid), the ubiquity of MP3 players has made music even more an integral part of our daily soundtrack. Muzak, it would seem, is as relevant as ever.

And … just because I said the word Polaroid … here’s a video of House MD’s Hugh Laurie in an old Polaroid TV advertisement: