Seeburg put out their famous Seeburg 1000 background music system starting in 1959 lasting until 1986. This system utilized special background recordings 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 special record player that could hold twenty-five records and play both sides of the record 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 the average side is about forty minutes long, so eighty minutes per record, twenty-five was more than enough to go the entire day and then 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 the same, made for shopping malls and supermarkets. The Industrial series was made for factories and is very upbeat and rather varied; by the 1970s, there was Disco in this series. Disco eventually made it into what would be considered the Basic series, but it would take a change in 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. Collectors particularly covet the later releases; 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 stop 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 system of background music in public spaces failed to be competitive 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.

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I am also willing to sell my physical copies of the records I have digitized and uploaded onto YouTube. 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 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 period to no longer have possession of that record in my physical personal collection to sell.

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