Muzak Holdings - Format

Format

Conventional home phonographs of the period played 10-inch or 12-inch laterally-cut shellacque discs at 78 RPM. Since neither Muzak, as a licensee nor the labels as content providers could afford for their programs to escape out into the general public, four safeguards were put in place to prevent that from happening. Similar to the ET records used in commercial radio, and for pretty much the same reasons:

1. The Muzak programs were cut vertically, otherwise known as the hill-and-dale recording method. Playing a vertically-cut record on a lateral-only player results in silence and destroys the disc being played on the very first try.

So even if a home user could find a vertically-compliant cartridge for his phonograph, there was still the issue of disc size. Muzak programs were pressed onto 16-inch discs, to ensure that they would be unable to fit on a standard home player.

In addition, the programs were pressed into soft acetate, and later vinylite, so that if someone tried to play them on a conventional phonograph built for the rugged shellacque discs, the weight of the playback arm would destroy the Muzak discs even if they were being played by a vertically-compliant cartridge.

And even if those three hurdles were to be overcome, no home phonograph of that period was able to play the 33-1/3 RPM speed at which the discs were recorded so that nobody with a conventional turntable could play them, preserving the copyright integrity.

Of course by then, the Library of Congress had already perfected the 33-1/3 speed as well, to be used in the recording of Talking Books for the Blind and Handicapped, whose players solved three of the four issues above. Their tonearms were lightweight, their platters spun at 33-1/3 and their tonearms could handle 16-inch records. All one needed to do was find a vertically-compliant transcription phono cartridge from a radio station and they were all set.

The more businesses subscribed to the service, the lower the overall cost became (economy of scale). The company aggressively pursued expanding the use of the music service to workplaces, citing research that indicated that background music improved productivity among workers.