Nostalgia has me hunting for the trumpety musak scores I fondly remember hearing while shopping at Zayre (later Ames) stores growing up.
I can’t seem to find anything specific online about Zayre’s music or composers, but have found plenty out there about Kmart’s muzak, including whole albums of the store’s recordings available to listen to on YT.
Youtube has some Zayre commercials, but I was hoping to find more. Does anyone know anything about this stuff?
Interestingly, I ran across a type of muzak called “Stimulus progression” which was designed to maintain productivity in store workers. Interesting topic and rabbit hole on wikipedia.
If you know where I might find the actual music or composers of Zayre’s music, please add your comments.
I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but Muzak isn’t just a cute mis-spelling of “music” intended to mean the kitschy arrangements used in stores, elevators, and the like.
It’s a copyrighted name for a company that produces and markets such music. They went bankrupt in 2010, but their stuff is now owned by Mood Media . When I lived in Salt Lake City, they had a billboard painted on one building. That seems entirely appropriate for both Salt Lake City and for Muzak.
One point being that, if you’re looking for Muzak that was played in the past – and if it really came from the Muzak corporation – they’d likely have the records (both kinds). You can always contact them.
Yes! I did learn that about Muzak being a company in the same wiki article I linked above. So it’s possible that the music I’m looking for may not have been produced by that company, but someone else and classified more as elevator or background music.
This was a standalone fancy record player that could play 20 records, top and bottom, and then re-stack them. The records were of a special size and ran at 16 2/3 RPM, so they were incompatible with consumer gear.
I have a couple Seeburg 1000 machines and about 300 of the records. I’m currently procrastinating getting going with the restoration of a Seeburg BMS2 (the really cool art-deco looking machine in the top right of that webpage.)
I think you’d be able to jerry-rig some sort of adaptor. I see the hole is 2", not 1 1/2" like on a 45, so there don’t seem to be any off-the-shelf solutions. And 16 2/3 speed – isn’t that a standard speed on record players? I know the record player I grew up with had 16 2/3, 33 1/3, 45, 78. ETA: Looks like it was common on 60s era record players, but maybe not so much now.
Back in the day, 16, 33, 45, and 78 were found on record players. 16 was for old audiobooks, 78 was for real old-school music.
The record players from the seventies had already dropped 16, and eventually 78.
I really only remember seeing two speeds on any serious turntable from the 70s onward.
Now, there is definitely a way to put together a bit of a lashup in order to play your Seeburg records. Techmoan even did another video where he went through the process of playing Seeburg records if you don’t have a Seeburg machine. You can even buy 3D-printed adapters, kind of like extra-large 45 adapters, to fit the records on a standard spindle.
To be frank, I love the music and the machines, and it would be sad to not be able to see the machine in operation while listening–or at least to know that a real Seeburg machine played the record when I ripped it to MP3.
The problem these days is that the machines are quite scarce (they appear only a couple times a year on eBay), the parts are nonexistent, and the special .5mil needles are even scarcer (you might see a pair show up once a year).
I recently found a pair of new-old-stock needles, and they are good for 1000 hours, so I am using them sparingly–to record my collection, not for frivolous listening.
Most “modern” quality turntables do not provide the 16 RPM speed. While it is tempting to transfer such records to a computer interface by playing them at 33 RPM and modifying the file digitally, just remember that the equalization curve should be considered. This is only important if you are an audio purist.
I always wondered what the 16 speed was for, as I had never seen a 16 (16 2/3) rpm record. I assumed it was some sort of lo-fi use, or perhaps some kind of long play. I grew up in the 80s, but I don’t know what era my father’s turntable was from. I would actually guess from the 70s. We did have 78s, though. I remember old jazz recordings on 78 and the records being made of shellac instead of vinyl.
I was quite a critic and negative voice about those elevator-music tracks in their day, but I really enjoyed hearing them again now. They were respectable arrangements & recordings, not half-bad! Anyone else get this feeling?
I knew a guy who worked for Muzak in the late 80s. Back then their music was sent by satellite from here in Raleigh. Maybe it still is. they did it here because a local company had satellite uplinks Muzak used.
A local radio station used to do Elevator from Hell, Muzak versions of rock songs and you had to identify the song. It was very hard I never got it right.
One thing I really like about the old background music (at least Seeburg) is that they had neat bass lines in the 1970s with their own style.
Specifically, many of their more upbeat songs feature lots of cool bass runs fairly high up on the neck that punch right through the mix. The jazzier tunes have walking bass lines of course, but the rock tunes quite often have a solid bass line based on quick catchy mid-range riffs on the major and minor pentatonic scales.
I think it might be a stylistic choice, but also might have been driven by their limited audio bandwidth.
Whenever I hear an awesome bass line in modern music, it’s often dipping down into the basement on the B string of a 5 string bass–I’m not cool enough for more than 4 strings, so those are a bummer. The Seeburg stuff, however, was all played on 4 strings, and the mid-range approach appeals to me.
I have incorporated quite a bit of the “Seeburg bass feel” into my own bass playing.
