Captain Pedantic checking in to remind our viewers that at a quick glance this does not appear to be Muzak (EDIT: no, that is definitely not Muzak), but rather ambient music played in K-Mart stores. Muzak is a specific brand of ambient music, which appears to suffer the same fate as Kleenex and Xerox:
Thank you Captain Pedantic. HN threads won't be the same without nitpicking and pedantry. I think by "ambient" you mean piped music, elevator music, Muzak(tm). Because Eno ain't no elevator music.
In keeping with the pedantic nitpicking, I think Eno might actually disagree and say that his music could be elevator music. In the liner notes[0] for 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports', he writes that "Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
But, speaking for myself, I wouldn't relegate Eno's music to the elevator. :)
It's funny. My favorite band, Devo, released Muzak mixes of their songs several times in the 80s. However, you would never hear such a thing piped in a store in 2020. Plain vanilla "Whip It" though? Absolutely.
Said another way, Eno (and Devo and many others) are essentially the Muzak of the modern day.
Devo was a bunch of brilliant, genre-defying creatives. In my point of view they have been as influential as Kraftwerk, but don't get as much love and respect.
At some point I feel like society deserves a vote. Sorry, you have claimed copyright & intellectual property, but we are just going to go to duckduckgo.com and google for whatever we're looking for. Your insistence that this (google, noun) is your word has failed; we all know it, why deny it.
Whatever the owners of "Muzak" wanted, whatever they thought of it: the dog is out of the yard. It's free. Your claim may be legal, but it is, by all accounts, incorrect and false. This word has a meaning now, this passive easy listening background vibe, humming nothings, it embodies something more real than what the owner intended. It's falsity & a lie that we let law & property dictate to us the terms by which we think. It's said that a rose would smell just as sweet by any other name. Well, society knows these roses, far better than whomever came up with the name. Let us not let the first-comers shape & dictate to us our usages.
(Velcro, I am coming for you. Your hegemony over this idea is coming to an end! We will not fall back to "hook and loop" forever, like animals! We all know we need a word. That you own it? Bah! Poppycock! The resistance of your lawyers does not cow me, does not frighten us!)
This post is currently underwater & doesn't deserve to be. I don't fully entirely agree with the shortness. But: upvoting. :)
Having read a little further now, I would say though, whatever the company brands itself as today does not strongly imply that they are permitting "muzak" to be a free term. Smart move to decouple yourself some, especially from a term that is synonymous with bland indistinct elevator music or on hold music, and it's probably hopefully all good these days, but there's still plenty of room for this company to perhaps be trying to push trademarks or harass other folk who use the word "muzak".
I worked at a restaurant that did have it and they appeared to be magnificent 16 track tapes (or whatever the alpha male of the 8-track family was). They looked like they could fit a full LP.
The YouTuber "techmoan" has done a few videos on the hardware that ran various background music systems, and one that stands out is the 3M Cantata, which had some massive tape cartridges https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WQbJ0VFrFQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak
That page is worth a read, if only for the means of distribution used over the years. But do I ever digress...