
Filing for bankruptcy last week , Muzak – purveyor of smooth sounds and easy-listening classics to offices and malls everywhere – revealed that it will be unable to pay its nearly half-billion dollars in debts. Since 1936 the company has been sedating the masses with a catalog which now numbers over 2.6 million songs. Is Muzak finally getting the shaft? Or is there a ground floor opportunity here for an acquirer? Regardless of its future or your thoughts on the genre it created, Muzak has a storied past as part of American culture. [...]