Maybe you could play a few songs on your radio show? Just for fun, maybe; I know not too many people like Muzak and it wouldn't be a good idea to play it for TOO long, but you're right, you rarely hear it anymore, and some of your listeners might get a kick out of the nostalgia.

The tapes are linked in the description; reprinted here for convenience:

https://archive.org/details/attentionkmartshoppers

Boomer I know! I still have all of my Landmark Theatres CDs from when I worked for them, the stuff you played in mostly empty auditoriums when the lights went up, but by that point a good 75% of it was just popular "alternative" hits from the radio. This is probably why I don't like Coldplay, because that song "Clocks" reminds me of sweeping up popcorn and sometimes bodily fluids among many other things. I might upload all of those sometime, but it's barely worth it since it's just like listening to the radio 10 years ago.

But what I've also noticed is how "hold" music has, as far as I know, gone down to a single soprano saxaphone loop. It's been the same recently whether I've been calling the pharmacist, booking a flight.. etc. I can't describe it too well but I'll bet if you call Walgreens you'll hear it, and the same if you call Wal-Mart or Delta. I figure a lot of this is because of cellphones, smart cellphones to be specific. Back in the day doing an unpleasant thing like waiting on hold actually meant you were waiting on the phone, but now you can put it on speaker, play a video game or read a book; waiting for water to boil or the elevator itself is less annoying, so it's like they stopped trying to create any sort of soothing soundscape.

Also whether people liked Muzak in the first place, it's the foundation of Vaporwave. Regardless of your opinion on the genre, that link is a fucking goldmine for a lot of my friends who embrace that genre like it's the second coming of music. I want to put the link on facebook but I feel like being selfish and chopping and screwing with the samples myself in my little ableton clone

The grocery store I used to work in during college had a music system that was of questionable legality: a cable TV box with its audio output hooked into the store's PA and music-on-hold systems. The box would be tuned to one of those "Music Choice" channels that are just audio streams with no video. I don't know what station it was on, but it had a lot of Bee Gees and Steely Dan mixed with Coldplay and Train. Some family-friendly "hits from today and yesterday" channel.

By the way, your feelings towards Coldplay's "Clocks" mirrors my feelings towards Donald Fagen's "Walk Between Raindrops". As much as I like Steely Dan and Fagen, I can't listen to that one song because it brings back many sour memories of my job.

Toys R Us used tapes at least until 2012 when I worked there. One night, during a lock-in, I snuck into the office and stole the tape, smashed it with a hammer, and left it on the manager's desk.

I don't really know what I was trying to prove, but they never did guess it was me.

Hi Homer, I've played EZ/background instrumental music before, and even have a Muzak Stimulus Progression 5 LP, it's a demo record that has full tracks that you might play in your workplace for productivity.

The cable TV audio channel was probably a version of Digital Music Express, and as I understand it, lots of stores hooked up and played it, it was better than local radio with commercials. DMX is still around on cable systems and satellite with different genre channels, though now they've gone to compressed audio distribution, where it used to be CD quality, maybe PCM at first.

Boomer