Muzak grew out of the work of George Owen Squier, a US Army Signal Corps officer and inventor who patented ways of sending signals over electrical wires. In 1922 the North American Company acquired the rights and set up Wired Radio, and in 1934 the service was renamed Muzak, a blend of music and the brand name Kodak. After Squier’s death in 1936 it concentrated on businesses such as hotels, restaurants and offices.
From the late 1930s, and especially in the 1940s, the company promoted Stimulus Progression, which programmed the working day in fifteen-minute blocks of gradually more energetic music separated by silence; its promise of more alert and productive staff came from the company’s own research rather than independent science. Muzak was at its most popular in the late 1950s and 1960s. Mood Media bought it in 2011 and retired the brand name in 2013, but the word survives as a generic, often dismissive term for bland background music, the very thing ambient and good lo-fi playlists try to improve on.