The Muzak's over: It's the end for the most reviled phenomena of the 20th century

It is, some would say, one of the most reviled phenomena of the 20th century, an unloved genre known to its millions of detractors as elevator music. Take a trip down to Fort Mill, South Carolina, to visit the headquarters of Muzak Holdings LLC, the spiritual home of Muzak, and you will hear its eponymous product in every room, pumped in from the giant Well database containing 2.6 million tracks. Every room, that is, except for the elevator.

With its mushy strings and cloying tones, the sounds which once emanated from Muzak's laboratories of sound at their height in the 1960s colonised almost every public space threatened with the spectre of silence. From the hotel lobby to the dentist's waiting room, from the shop to the airport lounge, Muzak was at once a company and a musical form, as well as a byword for corporate blandness in an age of consumer soullessness.

Related articles

• Leading article: Soul Muzak
• Search the news archive for more stories

Employees of Muzak say the absence of sound in the company's own lifts is maintained for "deeply felt symbolic reasons". The world, they say, has come a long way since New York architects needed a little mood-enhancing melody to coax nervous passengers into the narrow confines of their new-fangled vertical transporters. Muzak, the line goes, is now about so much more than elevator music.

But yesterday, the long and hard-fought attempt to transform the perceptions and declining fortunes of Major-General George Owen Squier's (pronounced Square's) piped music business suffered a major setback when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Chief executive officer Stephen P Villa insisted that the music would go on. "We intend to move through this process as quickly as possible and we firmly believe this course of action will better position Muzak for long-term success," he said.

But, sadly, after a failed merger with one of its major creditors, the "sensory branding" company DMX last year, the firm which began life as Wired Radio Inc in the 1930s has been teetering on the brink of financial collapse. As companies such as EMI clamour for their money, many of the firm's 1,250 employees face redundancy. Clients of Muzak, it seems, which once accounted for 60 per cent of all background music in the United States, are looking for cheaper ways to keep customers satisfied.

It might come as no surprise to those many millions who have grown to hate elevator music and its bastard offspring on-hold messaging, but the origins of Muzak can be traced to the United States military. As well as being a PhD and serial inventor in the field of radio, General Squier was also an aviation pioneer, helping the US Air Force get off the ground with its first planes and worked with the Wright Brothers. After the First World War, during which he had been in the forefront of the rapidly emerging military signals technology, General Squier spotted a civilian market for his wired sound and he sold his patents to a public utility company which began piping music into Staten Island direct from a hand-cranked record player at its New York City premises. Such a wired domestic music service was facing eclipse by the growth of radio, but there remained plenty of scope for pushing the product into the commercial sector. And before the general died in 1935 he was to bequeath one more brainwave to the emerging phenomenon. Inspired by George Eastman's celebrated Kodak trade name, he re-christened the company Muzak.

But Muzak was always about more than just music and its core. In the 1940s, Muzak came up with Stimulus Progression, the belief that piped music in the workplace, properly played, could stimulate production. Obviously, true music lovers should look away now, but this quasi-scientific (some might argue pseudo-scientific) theory claimed that an individual's mood could be lifted through listening to programmed sound in 15-minute segments. Within each block, the music is ordered from least to most stimulating, with the final and most upbeat track followed by a quarter of an hour of silence.

It proved a convincing sell and has helped bring Muzak to the ears of 100 million listeners each day. It reached the White House when President Eisenhower became the first commander in chief to pump music into the West Wing, and even Nasa's astronauts listened to it in space. But this being the Cold War, paranoia ruled and the company found itself increasingly accused of brainwashing and subliminal manipulation. The backlash reached a peak in the 1980s when rocker Ted Nugent sought to buy the company for $10m to close it down.

Trouble was brewing and in 1968 the first competition appeared. Rival Yesco began piping "foreground" music by real bands and singers rather than the schmaltzy cover versions produced by Muzak's in-house orchestra. The company only really got its act together in 1984 when it produced its first original artist material. Two years later, it merged with Yesco and was bought by Chicago department-store heir Marshal Field V. An agonising 10-year process was then embarked on which saw Muzak change hands yet again and move to its present South Carolina home before finally pressing the close button on the era of elevator music, emerging instead on the altogether sexier floor marked "audio branding".

Since then technology has transformed the means of delivery; satellites and broadband have rendered the old pipe or wire little more than a museum piece. And Muzak successfully notched up a series of big-name clients including Gap and Armani. Today it transmits a series of channels, all evocatively branded to reflect the requisite "audio architecture" of its target audience. Modern Muzak is as likely to grind along to Eminem and Dr Dre as kick back with Mantovani.

The fortunes of the company which gave the world elevator music may be stuck in the basement but the only way is up.

Uplifting Muzak? The Independent's top ten elevator hits

Coming Up Paul McCartney: Perfect chirpy pop song from the former Beatle.

Love in an Elevator Aerosmith: Yes it's a cliché but irresistible rock-out music for any self-respecting lift traveller.

Go Down Easy John Martyn: Classic mellow mood music to descend to from late great British folk blues legend.

Down Down Status Quo: Jean-clad rockers spent too long pressing the descend button

Lifted The Lighthouse Family: New Labour favourite which makes a seamless transition to the vertical transporter.

Push the Button Sugababes: Annoyingly catchy pop guaranteed to stay in your head long after you've left the lift.

Tired of Waiting for You The Kinks: The classic British rockers get bored by hanging around the lobby and take the stairs.

Ten Storey Love Song Stone Roses: Perfect for honing your Ian Brown monkey impression (only if you're alone).

You Take Me Up Thompson Twins: So bad it'll make you want to open the trap-door and throw yourself out.

Shaft Isaac Hayes: Soulful funk with sexual lyrics. Be careful not to sing along too loudly if your boss is present.