Yes. Mood Media is a company that bought Muzak, Inc - the original elevator music company (and the reason we sometimes talk about disposable music like this as “muzak”). They are a substantial business now owned by private equity. They acquired Muzak for soemthing like $300m a few years back.
Background music is actually quite difficult, commercially. Someone needs to write and arrange it, and they need to be paid - either royalties each time it is played which is why a lot of companies don’t use “known” music for telephone hold and so on - it’s too expensive. If it’s not on a royalty basis then the writer needs to be bought out - which can be expensive.
So having algorithmically generated music is actually really interesting because there is potentially no author to be paid. This is actually an emerging area of music copyright law. If an algorithm writes music who owns the copyright to that music? The computer? Probably not, not a legal person. The people who wrote the algorithms? Possibly - but did they actually create the music? Or does no one own it - meaning anyone can use it without payment? If a label commissions an algorithm to write hits who owns the music publishing?
Background music is actually quite difficult, commercially. Someone needs to write and arrange it, and they need to be paid - either royalties each time it is played which is why a lot of companies don’t use “known” music for telephone hold and so on - it’s too expensive. If it’s not on a royalty basis then the writer needs to be bought out - which can be expensive.
So having algorithmically generated music is actually really interesting because there is potentially no author to be paid. This is actually an emerging area of music copyright law. If an algorithm writes music who owns the copyright to that music? The computer? Probably not, not a legal person. The people who wrote the algorithms? Possibly - but did they actually create the music? Or does no one own it - meaning anyone can use it without payment? If a label commissions an algorithm to write hits who owns the music publishing?