Muzak Hath Charms

In a Washington beauty parlor last week a customer under a drier relieved 16 boredom by listening to the Third Man Theme through earphones. In Boston, a dentist drilled away at a patient who was listening to Brahms's popular lullaby In New York City, a plastic surgeon about to operate clapped earphones on the patient, then used his scalpel while the patient listened to the tune, Lovely to Look At In Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital, an expectant mother was prepared for delivery of her baby while the strains of Victor Herbert's Toyland came through speakers concealed in the labor-room walls.

All these far-flung musical notes last week were piping a merry jingle of dollars into the Manhattan headquarters of Muzak Corp., which grossed $5,000000 in 1949 by providing "wired music" to 10,000 customers in 150 cities, not only in the U.S. but also in Mexico, Canada and Puerto Rico. Last week Muzak, which now pipes its music over telephone wires, was tuning up a new project. It was starting large-scale production of tape recordings so that it could put music into air planes and other places with no phone connections.

Sharps & Flats. Like the Encyclopaedia Britanica, Muzak is another of the profitable enterprises of shrewd ex-Manhattan Ad Man William B. (Benton & Bowles) Benton, 50, now Democratic Senator from Connecticut. He bought the seven-year-old Muzak company in 1941, after a succession of owners had lost millions trying to make a go of it. To run Muzak, Benton hired handsome, go-getting Harry E. Houghton, another ex-adman, and he turned the trick by convincing industrialists that music improves workers' morale and efficiency. Houghton quadrupled the number of Muzak's customers, brought it from a near loss to a tidy but unreported profit. Muzak provides hardly any direct service to the customer. Instead, it sells the Muzak concession to individuals in different cities and takes a 10% share of their gross from charges of $35 a month and up for the service.

What Houghton does provide is a library of more than 6,000 recordings, produced at Muzak's own $1,000,000 plant in Elizabethtown, Ky. With these, Muzak maps out for its local "franchisers" complete daily, weekly and monthly programs tailored to the needs of individual customers.

Peaks & Valleys. All Muzak's industrial customers (General Electric, Ford Motor Co., Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., etc.) use it for the same purpose: to ease the tedium of workers performing endlessly repetitive operations. "It keeps me from getting nervous," said an assembler in the Chicago Hallicrafters' plant last week. "And it makes the fellow next to me more cheerful." In Manhattan's Federal Reserve Bank, where 300 girls sort out and count as much as $25 million in paper money every day, the officers have found that Muzak lightens their spirits and lessens their fatigue.

To help his franchisers sell the service, Muzak's Houghton has set up elaborate research studies which show, among other things, that the average worker is at a "low energy period" between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., picks up just before & after lunch, then hits the all-day low around 3:30 p.m. Muzak's programs (70% popular music, 20% classical & semi-classical, 10% novelty) are planned so as to give the worker zippier music (more wind and brass) at the low periods, soft music (strings and saxes) at the higher peaks. But Muzak is rarely loud enough to be distracting. As one Muzak man put it: "We spend thousands of dollars to make music not to be heard. We call it flat music."

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