Introduction
The Muzak Corporation began as a service provider for businesses, covering up unpleasant office noise with "background music," familiar tunes rewritten into the blandest, most digestible sonic curtain possible. But today's Muzak is entirely different, it provides customers with the choice of 60 different channels of popular music geared toward demographically targeted audiences. Muzak no longer re-orchestrates popular music, it broadcasts past and current hits - as they were originally recorded. Nirvana, the Chemical Brothers, Eminem, and Johnny Cash can all be found on Muzak's channels.
Muzak broadcasts programs to over 300,000 businesses worldwide and is experienced by more than 80 million people every day. It is the world's most listened to music broadcaster.
Muzak is using this strength to expand. It has begun a massive expansion into the home providing commercial-free entertainment. Given that Muzak owns the world's largest digital music library and its own satellite distribution system, it has the potential to challenge the existing broadcast and recording corporations - even as they are currently being restructured in the wake of Napster.