Seeburg put out their famous Seeburg 1000 background music system starting in 1959, lasting until 1986. This system utilized unique background records pressed onto nine-inch, 16 2/3 rpm vinyl records, each with a two-inch center spindle hole. These were designed to be played on a unique record player that could hold twenty-five records and play both sides before moving onto the next record in the stack, rotating through them in a cycle. The idea was that you would have heard at least 1000 tunes by the time the whole stack was completed. Given that the average side is about forty minutes long, eighty minutes per record, twenty-five was more than enough to go the entire day and some without repeat.
Seeburg background records were issued on subscription, and all of them were supposed to be returned to Seeburg to be destroyed after they were rotated out. However, many of them still made it to the present, for they are akin to all those V-Discs from WW2, which were not supposed to survive past the war but are still around as a hot collector's item. One can expect to pay around ten-ish dollars per disk if one wishes to own one of these records these days.
There was a series of "libraries" that offered the subscriber various "flavors" of music. The Mood series was made for restaurants and upscale establishments; it was as lush and posh as possible. The Basic series was a little more upbeat but mostly made for shopping malls and supermarkets. The Industrial series was created for factories and is very upbeat and rather varied; by the 1970s, there was Disco. Disco eventually made it into what would be considered the Basic series, but it would change ownership to do that.
Other series were developed for the "private" market, like the Encore series (Jazz-based, very classy), the Penthouse series. In the last years of the Seeburg line, after the original company filed for bankruptcy and was bought out by another company who tried to revamp the libraries to be more "hip," they put out Lifestyle, Contemporary, and Moody Mood. The later releases are particularly coveted by collectors; their minimum going price is at least 20 dollars a record. It is a bit ironic that collectors roll their eyes at a Readers Digest easy listen set but go crazy when similar music shows up on nine-inch 16 2/3 rpm records. Ultimately, what killed these records was the trend of more and more establishments moving towards "mainstreaming" their background music, i.e., replacing it with pop music, which was considered hipper and modern Seeburg's music line stopped production in 1986, a small company called MT records put a series of compatible records for a bit. Still, then it all ended after not too many years. Even K-Mart, the last major holdout of easy-listening, instrumental heavy in-store background music, had to cave in after the end of 1988, as they went mainstream in 1989
Thus, the old record-based background music system in public spaces failed to compete with tape-based systems, and they took over. Now we have pop music being passed off as background music now when we go shopping.
Feel free to ID the tracks, and do know that I did clean up the audio with DeNoise and Click Repair, so what artifacts from the record the audio comes from are very few and far between.
If you want to support this channel's ability to produce new content directly, consider becoming a patron at / budgetvinylworld today! Remember, if this channel has at least five patrons on Patreon, I will stop having video ads placed at the beginning and end of each video I can monetize. Note some content is claimed by their rightful owners, who may have policies that automatically place ads on videos with their Content-ID matched content.
I am also willing to sell my physical copies of the records I have digitized and uploaded onto RU-vid. All records are priced at $1 each, plus the costs of shipping them media mail. The only exception is for the Seeburg 16 2/3 rpm releases, the market value for those is at least ten dollars apiece, and that is pretty much what I have to pay to get ahold of any these days. Also, I was forced to drastically purge my collection multiple times between Fall 2014 and Summer 2017, so there is a good chance for videos released before or during that time to no longer possess that record in my personal physical collection to sell.
If you are listening to this, it is reasonably likely you or a loved one may be interested in genealogy or family history; if so, please consider a visit to www.myfamilygen.com today!
Looking for gift ideas? Please consider a visit to www.myfamilygen.com today! Chances are that either you or a loved one may be interested in having professional help learning more about your or their heritage.
27 мар 2020
