Tempo Was Scheduled Around the Afternoon Slump

It once played to about 80 million people a day in 19 countries. It filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and lost its name in 2013.

The doors slid shut and the strings started.

A song you knew, almost. The melody was right, but the voice was missing.

A row of violins carried the tune where a singer used to be.

You had not picked it. You could not turn it off.

It was in the dentist’s waiting room, under the whine of the drill.

It was in the supermarket, somewhere between the cereal and the coffee. It was on the telephone while you held for the bank.

You never heard where it began or where it ended.

That was the design.

The music came from Muzak, and the songs were the least important part of it.

The idea began with an Army general named George Owen Squier, who patented a way to send several signals over one wire. In 1922 a utility company licensed it. In 1934, in New York City, the service took a new name, built from “music” and “Kodak.”

The first home subscribers, in Cleveland, paid $1.50 a month. Radio at home was free. So the company turned to restaurants and hotels, then to offices and factories.

That turn revealed the real business.

A factory owner did not want entertainment. He wanted the afternoon slump to go away.

The company did not sell songs. It sold a shape for the working day.

The method had a name: Stimulus Progression.

Each program ran in blocks of fifteen minutes. Inside a block, the tempo rose and the instruments grew louder and brassier. Then the music stopped for fifteen minutes.

The strongest lift was scheduled for the hours when workers sagged, around three in the afternoon. The calmest stretch came right after lunch.

The company pointed to reports that output rose about 11 percent at wired workplaces. Employers did not need to love the music. They needed to believe the curve.

It was music arranged so that no one would listen to it.

Familiar tunes were rerecorded by studio orchestras with every sharp edge sanded off. A song a listener noticed was a song that interrupted work.

The program was also easy to copy. Tape replaced records in 1953, and local franchises could run the whole schedule in smaller towns, about 150 of them by 1957.

By 1981 the service reached about 80 million people a day in 19 countries.

The curve was built for the office and the factory floor. The money was moving to the store.

A shopper was not a worker on a clock. A clothing chain did not want its customers sped up. It wanted them to recognize a song and feel the store belonged to them.

Two small Seattle companies offered exactly that: original records by original artists, licensed for business use.

The rerecorded strings that had made the company famous now made it sound old. In 1985 it launched its own program of original recordings, and it merged with one of the Seattle rivals the next year.

That kept customers. It also erased the difference.

Anyone could license the same hits. Satellites, and later the internet, made delivery cheap for everyone.

The company’s role had been to decide how a room should feel, minute by minute. Once stores wanted songs they already knew, that decision moved to them.

The company carried heavy debt into the new century. The advantage that had justified it was gone.

On February 10, 2009, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

It emerged in early 2010 after cutting its debt by more than half.

In March 2011 a Canadian firm, Mood Media, agreed to buy it for roughly $345 million. Two years later the new owner retired the name.

Few buildings still pipe rerecorded strings into the elevator.

The schedule survived them. Streaming services sell playlists for focus, for the commute, for the slow hour after lunch.

Shops change their music by the time of day. Each choice adjusts the mood and asks nothing of the listener.

The listener still does not choose. The listener works a little faster, or stays a little longer.

The violins left the elevator.
The schedule moved into the playlist.