News

Mood Media to rebrand retired Muzak

February 13, 2013

Muzak, the music service that gets piped through the speakers at shopping malls and office buildings, will undergo a rebranding effort by its parent company Mood Media.

According to an article on guardian.co.uk, Mood Media has chosen to consolidate Muzak into "sensory" or "neuromarketing" — i.e. sensory overload that manipulates your buying habits. The company custom-designs sounds, sights and smells, capitalizing on Muzak's early pioneering of consumer psychology that found shoppers lost track of time and reported happier experiences with innocuous background music.

A former Muzak employee explained in the article that he once had an epiphany about his work:

"I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they've hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, 'Let's put on a show.' It was retail theatre ... Muzak's business wasn't really about selling music. It was about selling emotion."

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