George Owen Squier, Army Signal Corps major general and inventor, patented music transmission over power lines and founded Wired Radio in 1922. In 1934, admiring Kodak as a made-up word that conquered the world, he fused it with music: Muzak. From the 1940s the company programmed Stimulus Progression, fifteen-minute blocks rising in tempo, volume, and brass, then fifteen minutes of silence, engineered against the factory workday's energy dips. Eisenhower piped it into the West Wing; Johnson owned the Austin franchise; NASA used it on missions.
Elevator music. The word escaped the trademark and became the universal insult for music that should not exist, the soundtrack of waiting rooms and held calls. Muzak joined aspirin and escalator in the graveyard of brands consumed by their own success, with a twist: those words name things people want. This one names the thing people blame.
The claim, traced from Attali's Noise and the critics who followed: background music is not decoration but administration, a system for dosing attention and mood in people who never consented to the dose. On this reading Stimulus Progression was the algorithmic feed before the algorithm: a behavioral engine sold as wallpaper, tested on captive populations, optimized in secret, and noticed by no one, which was the design spec. Muzak did not fail to become Spotify. Spotify succeeded at becoming Muzak.
If the music is designed for you not to notice it, who is it actually for?