Oh my god. Oh my god. I've made an unimportant discovery that's upended everything I ever knew.
So Muzak. Maybe you know the name. The elevator music people. You know, vaguely relaxing, inoffensive background music you hear in stores. That kinda thing. I knew they'd been around forever and they'd distributed it on a bunch of formats, so I figured, by the 90s - it's CD now, right? Like, they sent you looping background CDs or something.
It looks like it wasn't normal CDs. (Now that I look up some of the track list and realize they had hours of music on one CD, I should have realized that wasn't possible.) Well, maybe it's a PC CD or something like that. A little embedded PC with a CD program that plays music. It's not that either.
It's CD-i. They were distributing background music for stores on CD-i. And I've found a CD-i Muzak disc from 2010 that they made, probably one of the last. Until now I thought CD-i died off in the early 2000s, ca 2002/2003. Looks like I was off by an entire decade.
Here's a link with info on the format and a photo of the very weird-looking CD-BGM player:
