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Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive
- mikestew 6y agoCaptain Pedantic checking in to remind our viewers that at a quick glance this does not appear to be Muzak (EDIT: no, that is definitely not Muzak), but rather ambient music played in K-Mart stores. Muzak is a specific brand of ambient music, which appears to suffer the same fate as Kleenex and Xerox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak That page is worth a read, if only for the means of distribution used over the years. But do I ever digress...
- shervinafshar 6y agoThank you Captain Pedantic. HN threads won't be the same without nitpicking and pedantry. I think by "ambient" you mean piped music, elevator music, Muzak(tm). Because Eno ain't no elevator music.
- polka_haunts_us 6y agoIt's funny. My favorite band, Devo, released Muzak mixes of their songs several times in the 80s. However, you would never hear such a thing piped in a store in 2020. Plain vanilla "Whip It" though? Absolutely. Said another way, Eno (and Devo and many others) are essentially the Muzak of the modern day.
- shervinafshar 6y agoDevo was a bunch of brilliant, genre-defying creatives. In my point of view they have been as influential as Kraftwerk, but don't get as much love and respect.
- jjulius 6y ago>Because Eno ain't no elevator music. In keeping with the pedantic nitpicking, I think Eno might actually disagree and say that his music could be elevator music. In the liner notes[0] for 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports', he writes that "Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." But, speaking for myself, I wouldn't relegate Eno's music to the elevator. :) [0]https://audioweb.sitehost.iu.edu/T369/eno-ambient.pdf https://audioweb.sitehost.iu.edu/T369/eno-ambient.pdf
- shervinafshar 6y agoTouché. Eno could be elevator music then.
- marcrosoft 6y agoHN comment threads are becoming like Reddit.
- dang 6y agoPlease follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note the very last one. HN has been "becoming like Reddit" since before it was HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852
- chris_wot 6y agoPedant's point: Eno's music could be played in an elevator. Eno is not elevator music.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y agoWhat elevators are you guys getting on that have music?
- jacobolus 6y agohttps://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-elevator-music https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-elevator-mu...
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- wumms 6y agoRene Magritte duck typing
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- ggm 6y agoEric Satie invented the form, composing music to leave the theatre to. He's said to have got very angry when people refused to leave.
- rektide 6y agoAt some point I feel like society deserves a vote. Sorry, you have claimed copyright & intellectual property, but we are just going to go to duckduckgo.com and google for whatever we're looking for. Your insistence that this (google, noun) is your word has failed; we all know it, why deny it. Whatever the owners of "Muzak" wanted, whatever they thought of it: the dog is out of the yard. It's free. Your claim may be legal, but it is, by all accounts, incorrect and false. This word has a meaning now, this passive easy listening background vibe, humming nothings, it embodies something more real than what the owner intended. It's falsity & a lie that we let law & property dictate to us the terms by which we think. It's said that a rose would smell just as sweet by any other name. Well, society knows these roses, far better than whomever came up with the name. Let us not let the first-comers shape & dictate to us our usages. (Velcro, I am coming for you. Your hegemony over this idea is coming to an end! We will not fall back to "hook and loop" forever, like animals! We all know we need a word. That you own it? Bah! Poppycock! The resistance of your lawyers does not cow me, does not frighten us!)
- vonseel 6y agoWhich, I suppose, is why they have rebranded to “Mood Media”, and no longer use the word Muzak. As you might have seen if you read the article.
- rektide 6y agoThis post is currently underwater & doesn't deserve to be. I don't fully entirely agree with the shortness. But: upvoting. :) Having read a little further now, I would say though, whatever the company brands itself as today does not strongly imply that they are permitting "muzak" to be a free term. Smart move to decouple yourself some, especially from a term that is synonymous with bland indistinct elevator music or on hold music, and it's probably hopefully all good these days, but there's still plenty of room for this company to perhaps be trying to push trademarks or harass other folk who use the word "muzak".
- anon73044 6y agoI believe most of the large retailers play from the Hitlist or Hot FM playlists. http://muzakwpn.muzak.com/ http://muzakwpn.muzak.com/
- tclancy 6y agoI worked at a restaurant that did have it and they appeared to be magnificent 16 track tapes (or whatever the alpha male of the 8-track family was). They looked like they could fit a full LP.
- kalleboo 6y agoThe YouTuber "techmoan" has done a few videos on the hardware that ran various background music systems, and one that stands out is the 3M Cantata, which had some massive tape cartridges https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WQbJ0VFrFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WQbJ0VFrFQ There are also systems with smaller cartridges https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_5DPvPiUMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_5DPvPiUMY Stacks of vinyl records https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kCHx3_vu9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kCHx3_vu9M And standard cassette tapes running at a lower speed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV2EhEd46BY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV2EhEd46BY
- seph-reed 6y agoJust a story: My friends and I built a beer-loan agency for a burning-man event. We had people fill out forms to get a beer loan, told them their credit was too low, sent them on a quest, then gave them a beer on return. This music is what we used for our fully fabricated waiting-room office. At one point a guy with a legal degree from Yale came to question our paper-work, and proceeded to litigate from the bar down the road we'd sold our failing business to.
- carabiner 6y agoJesus. White collar types have ruined BM. That sounds insufferable.
- rootsudo 6y agoMore like innovated fun in the desert!
- Bootwizard 6y agoYeah that sounds like some good fun. I'd love to do that! What are you on about?
- seph-reed 6y agoIt was a blast. Between my partner and I, we've got about 30 burns below our belts and have led two different 3-story burnable structures centered on community, play, and curiosity. Doing a comedy piece was new territory, but a lot of work went into making the most guady, out-of-place, consumerist looking strip-mall pawn shop we could. So much detail, and all of it just a bit off. It took people off guard, which for the older burners was a very welcome change, and for the newer ones it just seemed to confuse them. My favorite memory was two satanist girls who were on a lot of acid and who knows what else absolutely losing their shit. I think, in the end, we were all laughing at how depressing poorly regulated capitalism can be sometimes. I still laugh whenever I see pay-day loan stores.
- seph-reed 6y agoYou really shouldn't judge what you don't understand. I don't want to go into details, suffice to say: whatever you're imagining, it's completely mistaken.
- songshuu 6y agoI remember when this remix first dropped on Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/2mello/kmart-october-1989 https://soundcloud.com/2mello/kmart-october-1989
- quickthrower2 6y agoNot just Muzak - Music! I like the Kmart August 1992 Generic, and listening to that now as I code!
- shervinafshar 6y agoCorrected.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThanks, I realised I didn't really know what Muzak was either. I thought it meant inoffensive instrumental version of pop songs.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoKmart Week Of 02.02.1992. I'm surprised at how much I like it, and how much I hated this back then. ha im old now.
- WalterBright 6y agoOne nice thing about getting older is not worrying about whether the music you like is cool or not.
- justatdotin 6y ago--^
- whereistimbo 6y agoBut do you feel comfortable listening to Britney Spears and Katy Perry in public?
- WalterBright 6y agoBrittany who?
- rektide 6y agoI keep thinking this is a distilled piece of Americana, a cultural artifact, of a time, & place. But I'm not sure it's really distinctly American. The term feels insufficent.
- SubiculumCode 6y agoI love how absolutely esoterically random this is.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sebmellen 6y agoVaporwave artists are going to have a great time with this.
- fzzzy 6y agoThey already have :)
- unangst 6y agoK-Mart’s only Black Friday Instagram post was a picture of an end-cap featuring Spider-Man, Frozen and BABY YODA masks. https://twitter.com/unangst/status/1332526873130229760?s=21 https://twitter.com/unangst/status/1332526873130229760?s=21
- WalterBright 6y agoI've acquired a lot of 60's and 70's easy listening music from thrift stores. Bert Kampfert, Ray Conniff, Jackie Gleason, etc. I figure it's coming from estate sales.
- cafard 6y agoJackie Gleason? A side of him I never heard of. Or this is a different Jackie Gleason?
- jerrysievert 6y agowell, there's the alternate history version where he dreamt of space travel and helped launch mankind's quest to go to the moon. at least according to Futurama. so why not easy listening as well?
- WalterBright 6y agoJackie Gleason arranged and produced a number of easy listening albums. Yes, the How Sweet It Is guy! This one is my favorite: https://www.amazon.com/Music-Lovers-Jackie-Gleason-2012-07-31/dp/B00Y40EGK2/ https://www.amazon.com/Music-Lovers-Jackie-Gleason-2012-07-3... but really, all of his work is good. You're in for a treat if you've never heard his music before. P.S. The CD sounds wrong, I suspect some monkey business went on in the remastering studio. Get the vinyl version. Besides, these tunes just sound better with the needle drop, rumble and crackle of the old vinyl.
- sitkack 6y agoWalter, you can't really do it anymore, but I used to get answering machine tapes from The Bins and would drive around portland listening to peoples old "voice mail"
- WalterBright 6y agoI found my 20 year old answering machine in the basement a while back, and it was fun listening to the ancient messages on the tape.
- Bootwizard 6y agoFINALLY! I've been wanting to remix these kind of songs into hiphop songs for a long time. This is such a weird victory for music producers. These are a gold mine for hip hop sampling.
- rchaud 6y agoVaporwave producers as well
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raidicy 6y agoThis is my exact intention as well. I've got the tracks open in my editor and just let it play until something catches my attention.
- Bootwizard 6y agoHave you found a way to download or torrent them all?
- raidicy 6y agoNo but I imagine you could write a simple script to parse the links and download them en mass. No idea if archive inhibits such a thing though.
- cowmix 6y agoThis is a great find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hR4Gg6b9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hR4Gg6b9w
- cowmix 6y agoOriginal upload: https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1974ReelToReel https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1974ReelToReel
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoFun that some of the messages in-between the songs are for things like security being called to go to a particular zone of the store. I remember hearing those as a kid and wondering who got busted, never thinking that the announcement might be as fake as the security cameras.
- waihtis 6y ago"All warfare is based on deception." - Sun Tzu, 5th century BC
- beamatronic 6y agoYou just blew my mind. It was very convincing hearing these as a kid.
- BTCOG 6y agoAs a kid? Kroger stores regularly play these loudspeaker "Security check, zone blue" announcements to this day in certain stores about the country.
- jdporter 6y agoIt isn't always fake. I used to work in a retail chain store (I won't say its name, but it ends with "xx" and starts with "TJ") and we were trained to use certain codes on the PA when we needed security to come deal with a situation. The difference, I think, is that these real alerts were coded so as not to be understood by the customers.
- yellowapple 6y agoI can think of few experiences more surreal than listening to in-store music from the very week I was born.
- tingletech 6y agoprevious discussion in 2015 was flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369105
- robodale 6y agoWow, the S.S. Kresge Christmas Background Music. Pure gold. I can almost remember following my mom through the K-Mart aisles...
- anonymousiam 6y agoAttention K-Mart Shoppers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki0QM8sHdC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki0QM8sHdC8
- troyharvey 6y agoCheck out Attention Kmart Choppers. https://juicytheemissary.bandcamp.com/album/attention-kmart-choppers https://juicytheemissary.bandcamp.com/album/attention-kmart-...
- joezydeco 6y agoAnother popular background music system was sold by Seeburg (the jukebox manufacturer). You bought a Seeburg 1000 Background Music System and then subscribed to a service that mailed you double-sided vinyl records that were stacked into the unit and played back continuously. Records were mailed back at the end of a period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000 There's a streaming website for you to enjoy during your workday: https://seeburg1000.com/ https://seeburg1000.com/
- closeparen 6y agoOh man. Exurban wastelands of Nowhere, America. Endless fluorescent popcorn ceilings and despair. Is there another word for nostalgia, where instead of missing something you remember fondly, you are grateful to have escaped from something that seemed to drain your soul? I remember these places having an almost Dementor-like effect on me long before I was old enough to be a coastal elite or a classist or an architecture snob or whatever.
- shervinafshar 6y agoWonderful take. Thanks for sharing.
- B-Con 6y agoThis made me both chuckle and cringe a bit. Well put. The word you're looking for... My spouse suggested something related to trauma or PTSD. Then I saw "flashback" suggested.[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/508877/is-there-a-word-for-negative-nostalgia https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/508877/is-there-...
- underseacables 6y agoThis is childhood right here.
- pasdechance 6y agoI was just thinking about this a few days ago and even made a note to go look them up on archive.org. I think someone shared this a few years ago and it got picked up by buzzfeed (or whatever). When I worked retail we had this but it was a mini-cd system that looked like a GameCube. My boss was a little bit forced into investing in it because a customer was furious that a P!nk song on the radio had the word "ass" or "hell" in the lyrics. The shuffle on that thing was horrible, sometimes the same song would come up twice and most evenings we just kept it off.
- whereistimbo 6y agoNot every radio plays Clean version/radio edit of pop songs?
- whereistimbo 6y agohttps://pastebin.com/xJSGGpZi https://pastebin.com/xJSGGpZi
- whereistimbo 6y agohttps://pastebin.com/UD7LFUcY https://pastebin.com/UD7LFUcY
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jedberg 6y agoIn case anyone is looking, here is a Christmas tape to get you in the mood. It even includes the ads! https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1992 https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1992
- agloeregrets 6y agoWhat I find kinda strange in American Culture (as an American) is that the rest of the pop music tapes are pretty much just period music that no modern kid would recognize. The Christmas tape is a 100% known landscape. We let hits die but Christmas music is eternal.
- cfmcdonald 6y agoOne could argue that the whole point of traditions like Christmas is to have comforting, repeated experiences like listening to the same music each year, something to ground your mortality in timeless rituals that started before you were born and (you hope) will continue after you die. That said, there is lots of Christmas pop that doesn't make it into the canon. I have no recollection at all of the first song on the Christmas tape, and i was around then (and going to K-Mart with my mom).
- makeworld 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/988/ https://xkcd.com/988/
- jedberg 6y agoI'm not sure on the accuracy of that XKCD graph. Last Christmas by Wham! is noticeably missing (released in 1984). Also All I Want for Christmas is You, released in 1994.
- jedberg 6y agoI think it's a combination of copyright and licensing. The pop music they use on these tapes are cheap to license --- they weren't even popular when they were contemporary. They were just generic cheap music. For Christmas, there is a set of Christmas music that just gets played every year and is licensed in blocks that are fairly cheap. That's why you hear a lot of "traditional standards" and not much else.
- keiferski 6y agoThere is a fun niche on YouTube that’s similar to this. It’s called mallsoft or mallwave and is a subgenre of the vaporwave genre. https://youtu.be/JELt1jxJsHQ https://youtu.be/JELt1jxJsHQ https://youtu.be/FZUfiW3W1KY https://youtu.be/FZUfiW3W1KY
- sbarre 6y agoYou can also find good Mallsoft playlists on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4im2nSUjjCdReLLDNwDQoC https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4im2nSUjjCdReLLDNwDQoC
- scottmcdot 6y agoDan Bell would love this.
- PlugTunin 6y agoJust a heads up for any 1974 shoppers: there's no smoking on the sales floor. You have to be over by the cafe.
- mincer_ray 6y agoi spent a bunch of time sampling this back when it came out in 2015 https://curatorbeats.bandcamp.com/album/k-m-r-t https://curatorbeats.bandcamp.com/album/k-m-r-t
- _ix 6y agoThis is lovely. Thank you.
- EvanAnderson 6y agoLate to the party on this one but I wanted to leave this note for posterity. Turns out that there's an interesting business story and a timely death tied-in here too. I got curious because some of the tapes bear the name of an audio production company in Greenville, OH, a few miles down the road from my hometown. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA in our family grocery store when I was growing up. I did some searching and learned that back on November 30, the gentleman who founded the audio company, and who acted as the "voice of K-Mart", died. It looks like he was involved in ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of with some past involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) recently merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan". Quoting the obituary[2]: He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security. There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice". [1] https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsgroupinc.-lexington-ky-14562153.html https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg... [2] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.aspx?n=cecil-rutherford-lee&pid=197199331&fhid=8238 https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI