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What are you listening to?

An entire playlist of Mflex sounds songs. The artist basically makes very synth heavy music that sounds like it's right out of the 1980s. If the sounds of Rolands and Yamaha DX7s mixed with vaporwave are your fair, try looking him up.
 
Chrono Trigger - songs from ages ago,I know late to the party but as a kid I did not had hearing aids, so yeah.. it was kind of hard to listen to anyone.
 
Recently came upon a case of 1988-1992 K-Mart in-store music cassettes. Been playing them in a loop at work out in the shop building and it's strangely fitting. I missed the charm of older retail muzak!
 
nickdalzell said:
Recently came upon a case of 1988-1992 K-Mart in-store music cassettes. Been playing them in a loop at work out in the shop building and it's strangely fitting. I missed the charm of older retail muzak!
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Many of those muzak type BGM cassettes, won't usually play correctly on ordinary home or car cassette machines though. I came across some myself in early 2000s. And these ones played at two thirds of the normal 1.75ips cassette speed. Also it used the 4 tracks separately in a MONO mode, so a C90 tape would actually play music for four hours before it started repeating with the special BGM machine.

I remember in late 70s dad brought home a Rediffusion, Reditune background music machine and tapes from his office, that we used at home for about a year. This used cartridges that looked somewhat like radio station jingle carts, that had tape in a continuous loop, like 8-track does.
 
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These are all on compact cassette. The earlier ones that S.S. Kresge and the early Kmart of the '70s used were old reel-to-reel tape. The 88-92 tapes play on any cassette deck. Kmart themselves had a sort of odd cassette changer unit that queued up the different tapes for different times of the year or seasons, and the tapes were labeled a specific month of the year, or week, or season. The machine would go by a sort of clock/date and queue them up at the specific time. Both an electromechanical wonder but at the same time, a likely headache for the maintenence technician. Our Kmart never did the muzak though, they just had an AM/FM radio piped through the store speakers that was set to 96.1 FM which was the pop music station (now full of algorithmic or AI created garbage). I wasn't lucky to have grown up in the time they had real in-store music.

My father's doctor's office used to have a 'muzak box' that played '70s instrumental covers, but it was an oddball that was connected to either a landline or PBX phone system, and required a yearly fee to use.
 
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Firms using muzak type BGMs in their premises, would usually be paying some sort of fees for them, as often the players and tapes were rented or leased. Also I think performance fees would have to be paid to the likes of the RIAA, and MCPS/PRS (in the UK), if they were playing copyrighted music. That's why I think it was nearly always instrumental covers of songs used in BGM, because of performance licensing fees.

I know some businesses in the UK were raided by the music copyright agents(MCPS/PRS), for playing music without a performance license, even for playing music from the radio. I've seen notices in shops with things like "LICENSED FOR MUSIC by MCPS/PRS".


They might have some sort of rotation for mood, music type, season etc. e.g. Christmas music for Christmas, upbeat, relaxing, etc.

The Reditune BGM dad brought home from work was definitely leased, and eventually it had to go back. We had it connected to a speaker in the dining room, and would play some instrumental whatevers during meals. I'm sure what happened, they had it playing background in the office for a few days and nobody liked it, but due to Reditune contract I think they were stuck with it for a year until the lease expired, and so that's why dad had it at home instead. From what I remember of it, you could exchange the cartridges as often as you liked. You'd return the no longer needed tapes in a pre-paid package, and Reditune would send you new ones, chosen from their catalogue.
Reditune6.jpg


It was one of these....
 
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The one at the office just died when the service ultimately EOL'd in the mid 90's. It sometimes came back to life for an hour or so randomly then went out again. I think when dad died, the office still had that thing there, dead, but with its little neon pilot lamp still lit and all the wires still coming out of it to the bus bar then ceiling. I never knew what brand it was, but it definitely relied on the phone system. The phone system then was the kind of business phone that used older Western Electric phones with little lit buttons on the bottom below the touch-tone pad that blinked for extensions or other reasons. That place never got out of the '70s except the one PC that ran Windows 98SE for doing FAA medial records.
 
the whirr of my Vostro laptop's HDD since I'm sitting here bored out of my gord at 5AM. (I hate waking up ~3 AM and feeling wide awake and can't get back to sleep)
 
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