Word: muzak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...these far-flung musical notes last week were piping a merry jingle of dollars into the Manhattan headquarters of Muzak Corp., which grossed $5,000000 in 1949 by providing "wired music" to 10,000 customers in 150 cities, not only in the U.S. but also in Mexico, Canada and Puerto Rico. Last week Muzak, which now pipes its music over telephone wires, was tuning up a new project. It was starting large-scale production of tape recordings so that it could put music into air planes and other places with no phone connections...
Sharps & Flats. Like the Encyclopædia Britanica, Muzak is another of the profitable enterprises of shrewd ex-Manhattan Ad Man William B. (Benton & Bowles) Benton, 50, now Democratic Senator from Connecticut. He bought the seven-year-old Muzak company in 1941, after a succession of owners had lost millions trying to make a go of it. To run Muzak, Benton hired handsome, go-getting Harry E. Houghton, another ex-adman, and he turned the trick by convincing industrialists that music improves workers' morale and efficiency. Houghton quadrupled the number of Muzak's customers, brought it from...
What Houghton does provide is a library of more than 6,000 recordings, produced at Muzak's own $1,000,000 plant in Elizabethtown, Ky. With these, Muzak maps out for its local "franchisers" complete daily, weekly and monthly programs tailored to the needs of individual customers...
Peaks & Valleys. All Muzak's industrial customers (General Electric, Ford Motor Co., Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., etc.) use it for the same purpose: to ease the tedium of workers performing endlessly repetitive operations. "It keeps me from getting nervous," said an assembler in the Chicago Hallicrafters' plant last week. "And it makes the fellow next to me more cheerful." In Manhattan's Federal Reserve Bank, where 300 girls sort out and count as much as $25 million in paper money every day, the officers have found that Muzak lightens their spirits and lessens their fatigue...
Most Bee staffers disagree. Growled one copyreader: "I get my Liebestraum all mixed up with my rape. And on a deadline, it's murder." Five times in the past year, unrelaxed, unidentified staffers have stopped the Muzak. Last week a chilling notice was tacked on the bulletin board: "Anyone turning it [the music] off again will be fired immediately. [Signed] Myron Depew, City Editor." Since newspaper jobs are hard to get, Muzak will now probably play on unmolested...