There were various lo-fi business music systems. Muzak, like United Biscuits, distributed over telephone lines. There were self-contained systems. Seeburg, the jukebox maker, made one, the Seeburg 1000. It wasn't random access like a jukebox. It just played a stack of records over and over with a relatively simple mechanism.<p>Seeburg's had their own orchestra, in Chicago, and recorded their own records. They just had to buy a "mechanical license" from the songwriters, which in the US costs a fixed rate set by law. So they owned rights to the content. To protect it, they recorded it on a nonstandard sized disk (9 inches), a nonstandard hole size (2 inches) with a nonstandard speed (16 2/3 RPM, rather lo-fi) and a nonstandard stylus size (5 mils). They didn't copyright the content; that cost money back then.<p>Someone collects these obsolete machines, restored a Seeburg player, and modified a modern turntable to play them. They stream it out, legally.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://radiocoastcom.godaddysites.com/" rel="nofollow">https://radiocoastcom.godaddysites.com/</a>
In the 90s I worked at a pharmaceutical factory. They had little autonomous electric line follower vehicles that transported samples through the halls.<p>Because these moved very silently, every one of them had small transistor radio attached (in a makeshift way) that blared music through the buildings.
I'm always shocked more companies don't do things like this, especially now that it's so much cheaper. Yes, yes, everyone has their own playlists, but an employee-run, company-wide streaming station is a cheap moral builder.
TIL. I thought this would be related to King Biscuit Time, "the longest-running daily American radio broadcast in history", but apparently it's just a coincidence:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Biscuit_Time" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Biscuit_Time</a>
See also:<p>LEO, the first business computer system in the world, built in 1951 by J. Lyons & Co to calculate the cost of cake ingredients.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)</a>
See also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_radio" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_radio</a><p>(I’d assumed this was a global thing, but it seems to mostly just be the UK and Ireland.)