Ross Reynolds

“Music industry defenders of streaming muzak like to point out that artists themselves have been making functional music for decades. The argument usually begins by pointing to Brian Eno’s 1978 Ambient 1: Music for Airports, widely considered the first ambient record, which came with a manifesto outlining how ambient “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” For example, the cofounder of Endel, a German app that builds on the logic of the functional playlist boom by generating “personalized functional soundscapes,” cites Eno as his biggest influence.10 Today’s functional music front-runners seem to miss something essential about the history of ambient, though, and the traditions it draws from and helped shape. For his part, Eno claims to have conceptualized ambient as a direct response to the cultural pervasiveness of Muzak, rather than a recreation of it. He called ambient music “an atmosphere or a surrounding influence: a tint,” which he created to suit “a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.” In Eno’s explanation of it, consummate artists were not supposed to make background music, and he asked, why not? “I use it to make the space that I want to live in.”11”
― Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist