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by Animats 1521 days ago
If generic jazz can easily substitute "important" jazz it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it, especially not in the context of "things for background music."

This is a modern version of Seeburg background music. Seeburg was a jukebox company, and as a sideline, they also sold a background music system. This used a special purpose record changer that played a stack of records over and over.Seeburg made their own records, recorded by their own orchestra in Chicago, and distributed them through their own jukebox dealers. So they didn't have to pay anything to record companies. It was a subscription service; every few months, subscribers got a new set of records with 1000 songs, and the old set was taken back to Seeburg. The records were not copyrighted, which cost money back then. Instead, they were 9 inch diameter, 2 inch center hole, 16⅔ rpm, 420 grooves per inch, 0.5 mil diamond stylus, all of which were incompatible with record players of the era. They were not sold, just rented, although often nobody bothered to ship them back to Chicago for crushing, so many have survived. DRM, the early years.

You can listen to them here.[1]

[1] https://streema.com/radios/RadioCoastcom

3 comments

We had a system like this when I worked at a retail store, and later a movie theater. It was a double-sided cassette that had 60 minutes of audio, and would auto switch from A/B side and back again. Most of the year it was just instrumental background music, but Christmas was a really hated time of year, as all those songs have lyrics (that's what makes them Christmas themed) and it was very obvious how long you'd been working your shift when the celebrity version of "Jingle Bells" played for the fifth time that day.
I avoid all shopping around Christmas for that reason, it is just too terrible to hear the same crap over and over again in every store.
The worst thing is that now Halloween music is becoming a thing.
I note that streema.com is trying really hard to get me to install "easy search tool" by favouring the START button above the PLAY button. If it's not them directly, it's a dark-pattern ad they are running
Sorry, I had that blocked, so I didn't see it.

Here's the raw audio stream: http://198.178.121.76:8157/stream

Interesting, never heard of this service. Its purpose was to compete with Muzak, I assume? The use of nuclear weapons has been authorized.
Its purpose was to compete with Muzak, I assume?

Yes. See [1]

The Seeburg 1000 could play a stack of 25 records, both sides, each side good for about an hour of music at the slow speed. Thus there was about 50 hours of audio in the stack, enough to keep it from being too repetitive.

Musak worked by distributing audio over phone lines, rather than using an on-site player.

Streaming no-name covers of songs as low-cost background music is not new at all. From a historical perspective, that's the history of music - mediocre musicians playing background music for little money. For a brief period of history in the 20th century, being in a famous band was a Big Deal. That started with mass-market record production, and ended when there were several million MySpace bands.

All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000