Background Music Systems

Price (October, 1963): $495

There were a number of competing background music suppliers, with Muzak being the biggest and such competitors as Seeburg, AEI, Yesco, and 3M trying to get their share of the market.

Problem was, until the late 1970s Muzak was the only one with nationwide distribution of music from a single studio.  For decades, Muzak was delivered across the nation with dedicated telephone lines, and later satellite broadcast.  From the local telephone office, Muzak was normally delivered to the end-user through more telephone lines, or sometimes through an FM Sub-Carrier Audio (SCA) broadcast.

Pretty much everyone else had to have record or tape players installed in each location, such as the Seeburg '1000' machines.

Muzak had two main feeds going out -- the East and West feeds.  Fairly early on, the Muzak sales organization realized that it was hard to sell a one-size-fits-all music service to everyone in the nation.  This was especially a problem when Seeburg (with the SICM and the LU machines) and others could offer flexible programming to suit each location's needs.

Muzak, always great at funding "Scientific" studies that proved the point they had decided on ahead of time, "discovered" that the Scientific benefits of Muzak-brand sound-masking and stimulus-progression product were even more effective if the Muzak was turned on for 15 minutes, then off for 15 minutes.

This totally unbiased Scientific discovery was in no way related to the fact that Muzak figured out that they could offer either Industrial or Office/Retail/Restaurant music without adding a second feed if they divided the hour up into 4 segments, with the first and third quarter hour being Office, and the second and fourth being Industrial.  By installing a cheap, simple timer in each location, the Muzak product could be turned on for the desired 15 minutes, and off for the other.

Seeburg, 3M, and no doubt others responded by adding Program Timers to their players, which allowed the location management to decide on how many selections were played during a half hour.  The BMPT (Background Music Program Timer) option on the Seeburg BMS machines is the result of this foolishness.

Anyway, it would occasionally happen that a Muzak territory would be taken over by a Seeburg operation.  In this case, some sort of central music supply was needed to feed all of those telephone lines.  Of course, you COULD just hook up a '1000' player, but that wouldn't offer enough program flexibility to keep up the ruse that Muzak had created.

The device in the picture is the answer for this situation, as well as an upgraded music feed for large installations, such as shopping malls and office buildings.

The cabinet contains three Seeburg BMCs, each on a pair of drawer slides to make record changing and maintenance less difficult.

There are three timers up top to control the music program (each machine would be loaded with a different library -- Industrial, Basic, Mood, or whatever), and a monitor/control panel so you know what's going out the feed.

Satellite distribution of background music obviated the need for devices this cool, and they were mostly scrapped.  I have some boxes of the last Replacement Libraries for the Seeburg '1000' system, which must have been sent out in 1987 or so.

This unit was offered on a recent Internet auction. The MPE1 was used to occasionally inject a commercial into the background music.  The audio output of the Background Music system plugs into this unit, which then outputs either the background music audio, or the commercial, which comes from a record on the MPE1 turntable. The records were to be specially cut with the commercial on them, but obviously you could put any record you wanted on the turntable. The turntable was purchased from Voice of Music.  Control switches gave you the choice of only playing background music, only playing what was on the turntable, or a mixture of both. The rotary selector switch without the knob in the photo lets you choose between 1 and 10 background music cuts per MPE1 record cut. It worked by sensing the quiet passages between selections to activate a stepper switch which would interject MPE1 audio once the wiper arm reached the position selected by the rotary switch. Photo from ebay.