*It's CD-i. They were distributing background music for stores on CD-i.* And I've found a CD-i Muzak disc from *2010* that they made, probably one of the last. Until now I thought CD-i died off in the early 2000s, ca 2002/2003. Looks like I was off by an entire decade.
Incredible
This is really funny if you just know CD-i as the weird, expensive video game thing that flopped. If you know how CD-i was originally envisioned and received, being fated to interminable Muzak playback is like a punishment out of Greek mythology.
David Rosen, History in the Making: A Report from Microsoft's First International Conference on CD ROM, Educational Technology, Vol. 26, No. 7 (July 1986), pp. 16-19
this new yorker article about mid-00s Muzak has stuck with me for nearly 20 years but i never thought to investigate the “high-capacity discs” they used to distribute the playlists...! archive.today/Zgqih
Holy shit @ohpoorpup.bsky.social did you know this?
This is blowing my mind. It’s so fascinating to see where “dead” formats found use after they disappeared from the public consciousness!
god, I need to dig out the CD-I author tools sometime
Could the Muzak discs be ripped and played on a CD-i emulator (or possibly the CD-i MiSTer core that's still in development)?
thats nuts!!
Here's a link with info on the format and a photo of the very weird-looking CD-BGM player: www.icdia.co.uk/related/cdbg...