Muzak polishes shopping experience

McClatchy Newspapers

MIAMI — If you’ve ever walked into a Macy’s or any one of about 3,000 businesses across South Florida, you’ve heard what Bob Pearl does for a living.

Pearl runs Muzak franchise holder Melody Inc. Muzak has a catalog of 2.6 million songs grouped into approximately 95 sometimes overlapping subgenres. It includes Madonna, the Beatles and Bach. It sounds like real music.

Almost none of it sounds like the schmaltzy instrumental renditions of commercially released songs linked forever in the popular imagination with dentists’ offices and elevators.

Muzak has been around since 1934, when a former Army officer named George Squier developed a system for sending sound over electricity and telephone lines.

By the time Pearl’s father, Hy, bought the local franchise in 1965, Muzak corporate had been bought and sold several times and did much of its business with companies that wanted music to play for their own employees. It sold something it called environmental music, what everybody else eventually came to call muzak.

Right up through the late 1980s, Muzak marketed its environmental music as a management tool. Songs were sequenced to increase tempo and meter at times of the day when workers tended to tire.

As the company shifted its focus to retail settings and from workers to consumers, it still touted the power of its music to influence human behavior. A host of studies, some financed by the company, suggested background music encouraged consumers to spend more time in stores and made them feel less crowded while they shopped and less antsy while they waited to pay.

“Music is an extension of the brand, something you can reinforce even without the customer looking at it or touching it,” said Greg Saphier, Melody’s vice president and Pearl’s son-in-law. “It’s evanescent, but it’s always there. You can’t turn it off, can’t change it. It’s kind of the polish on the whole shopping experience.”