Seven years ago I started buying muzak. That's right you heard me, it's on my playlist. And that's right, you too can buy muzak. I learned a long time ago to stop questioning my own behavior and just let it happen - it all makes sense if you wait long enough.
It all started while watching a Japanese television show about the cultural practices around sleep in Japan. (If you fall asleep in class as a college student, it's not seen as disrespectful, because just being in the same room shows you care.) The background music caught my ear, and I looked further into the description for the video, and found the source (go figure, what a crazy idea).
Then I said to myself - can I buy this? Is muzak only for sale to Japanese television show producers and discount furniture store managers? Yes! No! You can totally buy muzak. In fact, it's easier than buying regular music these days (probably because nobody buys music these days). I found the track I was looking for, even looked up the artists involved and bought a couple more. I left the experience thinking how strange it is to be a human, urges and decisions come from seemingly nowhere, make you do things, but at the same time there's a man behind the curtain, watching the one who does things, bewildered. What is wrong with me? Who on earth is buying muzak, on purpose, like to listen to on purpose?
Years later, two weeks ago, I sit in a cafe listening to laid back acoustic covers of pop music from the 60's - 90's coming from their streaming platform's playlist. After one too many of these cover songs, I get a chill down my spine - something weird about this, the entropy-measuring machine in my head is confused. I approach the business owner and ask where these songs are coming from. He tells me Spotify, but I already know that. I ask again, are these songs AI? All of them are AI, aren't they? I saw the flash in his eyes. Prompt engineering has been a thing for a while now; people are familiar with it. So this business owner imagines out loud, "young asian with thick rimmed glasses acoustic guitar for low-key cafe background music", like that? Just like that, I said. And he looked at the device controlling the music, and he scrolled through the artists, and he looked at the prompt he originally input. He scrolled down, then back up, then back down again, his eyes feverish and darting.
The following week, I'm eating lunch in a grand banquet hall for a work conference in Atlantic City, laid back music softly playing in the background. But then it happens - it's Black Sabbath's Ironman, as a bossa nova cover. Now I am no music expert, maybe an aficionado, but by no means a music trivia master. But I will tell you this - if you've ever heard a bossa nova cover of Ironman, you would fucking know. (The Cardigans is as close as you'll get by the way). That's it. I put down my fork, and with a mouthful of food I walk across the banquet hall of 1,000 people and up to the DJ. He's behind a table, manning his decks and his sound equipment, minding his own business. I start off politely, but then I can't hold back - what the hell is this? There's no way this is real. He's confused. I say look at the playlist, you recognize any of these artists? He says who the hell are you. I say look at the playlist. He does. He's still confused. He looks back at me and asks again who I am. But that's not important, I'm not important. What's important is that he - who apparently owns the audio-visual company serving this conference, had no idea this was happening. He just types "bossa nova brunch hour", pushes the button and sits down for the afternoon. I don't blame him, to be clear, although I'm a bit more upset about the guy running an A-V company than the one running a cafe.
Maybe you run a business. Maybe you like to have music in the background for your customers. Not like the kind of music that makes you wanna cry, or fight, or dance or sing. The kind of music that makes you more relaxed, maybe more focused, but that you don't really notice. Some might call this functional music, but I haven't heard the term used, I'm just making this up.
Then I realized there's already a word for this; it's called muzak. Start paying attention and you'll hear it too. You can tell because entropy. (See below for links to older posts about how entropy works in music, and information in general.) Entropy is an important concept in the world of artificial intelligence, and once you know what to look for, it helps you understand how it works, and how it doesn't.
Let's make this point real quick - Spotify does not pay musicians anymore, because they don't have to. They made a music generator that's been trained on real musicians' music, and plays that music back again, but in a way that's different enough to be considered Fair Use (under copyright law), and despite that fact that they stole the training music in the first place. You load a prompt, Japanese television show background music for example, and sit back and let the computer make music for you in real time. Guess who gets paid - not the original musicians, not the computer making the music in real time. Spotify gets paid; they get paid by advertisers, and by business owners who want ad-free music. And they pay nobody in return. They have effectively removed musicians from the equation.
And we have effectively moved right past muzak, and into the low-entropy world of cold, unemotional non-music. This essay by music blogger Ted Goiai does a great job explaining what's happened to the music industry over the past years and even decades, as it becomes more and more boring, less and less able to create something new, or to take risks. Everything becomes plain vanilla, everything becomes a potato. No parsnips, no yams, no yucca, no celery root, no daikon, no turnips, no rutabaga. Just potatoes, because they are the most in-between, the most representative, and ultimately the most boring. The way artificial generation works is ultimately ruled by thermodynamics, and so the output can never have more entropy than the input. In other words, the music being produced can never be more interesting than what it's copying.
Should I be making a plea for people to support their muzak-making co-species? Perhaps. Or perhaps muzak was the first vulture to circle this industry. I'd rather make a plea for business owners who want music to play at their place of business to reach out to local radio station DJs who know where to find real, new music. There is new music being made every day by real humans. It's new, it's real, and it's good, but you would never know, because the consolidation of the music industry, and unfortunately every creative industry, makes everything look like everything else until there's only one song left (probably a Beatles song). If you run a business, you don't have time to find these musicians and their music. But local radio station DJs do, and they can help you populate your playlist.
Two weeks after the epiphany at the cafe, the owner is back to his old playlist, which is about 500 songs by artists you know and love. No covers, no computers, just music. But two weeks after that, he's back to the muzak (auto-generated aka AI music). We can only listen to Nirvana's cover of The Man Who Sold the World so many times, you know? And the novelty has yet to wear of for the auto-generated, author-vacant, soft-cover version of that song where the auto-translated lyrics screw up Kurt Cobain's mumbled words and repeat them like they're totally normal (the way your GPS has funny ways of pronouncing some of the streets in your neighborhood).
Somewhere between the two stands the music industry, like "Confused John Travolta" in Pulp Fiction.
Post Script from the Music Writer Ted Gioia:
"In fact, nothing is less interesting to music executives than a completely radical new kind of music. Who can blame them? The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. Anything that genuinely breaks the mold is excluded from consideration almost as a rule. That’s actually how the current system has been designed to work." -Is Old Music Killing New Music? Jan 2022 [link]
Further Reading on How Entropy Works in Music, and Information in General:
Entropy Engineering and Social Syncopation, 2025
Your Brain is a Prediction Machine, 2021
Culture as Learned Probability System, 2012
On Free Will and Risk, 2012
Nature Nature Everywhere, 2017
