MISCmedia for 3/21/00
When the Muzak's Over

MOST OF US, I suspect, have experienced the moment.

You hear your favorite or once-favorite song; only something's different, something's wrong somehow.

Then you remember: You're in a store, restaurant, or (yes) elevator; and the tune you're hearing is a syrupy symphonic rendition, probably piped into the premises on equipment leased from the Muzak company.

I just experienced this a week ago. The place was a Bartell Drugs store. The song was the Posies' classic "Golden Blunders;" redone in total "stimulus progression" precision.

While Muzak regularly licenses compositions wholesale from song-publishers' catalogs for either re-arrangement (on the Muzak-classic satellite feed) or original-version replay (on its other channels), there might've been a special reason for including the Posies' song.

While I don't believe any Posies members worked at Muzak, many of their pals in the Seattle music scene did. It's easy to imagine some of them picking their pals' tune for extra rotation (and extra ASCAP royalties).

Muzak, founded in the '30s in New York (it originally distributed its programming on leased phone lines), moved its HQ to Seattle in the mid-'80s after a merger with the locally-based Yesco, which fed what it called "foreground music" (i.e., the original recordings, not string-laden covers) into business places.

Another merger later, and Muzak's moving again; this time to the Carolinas.

In the overheated Seattle economy of the early-Oughts, there are plenty of software-biz and dot-com-biz jobs to be had for those Muzak programmers, librarians, engineers, administrators, etc. who might choose not to relocate.

Slightly more problematic are the local job prospects for the music staff--the creators of Muzak-classic's cover recordings, and the curators of Muzak's "foreground" channels.

It's not just the hard-rock scene in Seattle that's seen its share of the global music-biz mindset diminish lately. Commercials, industrial films, and other non-pop production work's also down.

The one bright spot: soundtrack scoring.

Clever entrepreneurs, including members of the Seattle Symphony, have made Seattle an unsung center of movie background music making. (You know: The stuff that used to be heard on soundtrack albums, before those were turned into pop-hit anthologies that had little relation to anything you actually heard in the movie).

Seattle's chief emerging rival in this field is Salt Lake City; specifically companies formed there by veterans of Bonneville International's old "beautiful music" radio programming division (which used to produce Muzak-like recordings for broadcast FM stations).

So you won't hear Seattle-made violin-and-synth stirrings in your drugstore (at least not after Muzak-classic's current fare eventually gets retired from rotation).

But you'll still hear it in six-channel Dolby at your multiplex when the 55-year-old leading man tenderly embraces the body double of his 25-year-old co-star.

TOMORROW: Learning to appreciate the worst comic strip in the papers.

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