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THE BLUE LIGHT
Oct. 12th, 2015 05:09 pmITEM [via Chart Attack]: A former K-Mart employee has uploaded 56 cassettes worth of K-Mart background music on the internets.
Here’s the October 1989 edition.
I listened to some of it. It’s a somewhat surreal experience, especially when the seeded store promos kick in.
I’m fascinated by stuff like this. Not the music itself so much as the packaging of it. I came across stuff similar to this in various music libraries of radio stations back when I was employed in the business – some on cassette, some on vinyl. We didn’t use them – they’d just never been thrown out. Or in the case of the cassettes, they were often reused for recording, but sometimes the original content was still there.
Anyway, as awful as the music is, it had a purpose – the songs weren’t chosen at random or slapped on in any order. The New Yorker has a pretty interesting tl;dr article about Musak (the former king of elevator music, defunct as of 2013) and the art of “audio architecture” here, if you want to know more.
Alternately, here's the abbreviated Mental Floss version.
The soundtrack of our lives,
This is dF
Here’s the October 1989 edition.
I listened to some of it. It’s a somewhat surreal experience, especially when the seeded store promos kick in.
I’m fascinated by stuff like this. Not the music itself so much as the packaging of it. I came across stuff similar to this in various music libraries of radio stations back when I was employed in the business – some on cassette, some on vinyl. We didn’t use them – they’d just never been thrown out. Or in the case of the cassettes, they were often reused for recording, but sometimes the original content was still there.
Anyway, as awful as the music is, it had a purpose – the songs weren’t chosen at random or slapped on in any order. The New Yorker has a pretty interesting tl;dr article about Musak (the former king of elevator music, defunct as of 2013) and the art of “audio architecture” here, if you want to know more.
Alternately, here's the abbreviated Mental Floss version.
The soundtrack of our lives,
This is dF
