Seeburg's had their own orchestra, in Chicago, and recorded their own records. They just had to buy a "mechanical license" from the songwriters, which in the US costs a fixed rate set by law. So they owned rights to the content. To protect it, they recorded it on a nonstandard sized disk (9 inches), a nonstandard hole size (2 inches) with a nonstandard speed (16 2/3 RPM, rather lo-fi) and a nonstandard stylus size (5 mils). They didn't copyright the content; that cost money back then.
Someone collects these obsolete machines, restored a Seeburg player, and modified a modern turntable to play them. They stream it out, legally.[1]
Because these moved very silently, every one of them had small transistor radio attached (in a makeshift way) that blared music through the buildings.
It's hosted in Bentonville, but distributed to all the stores in the US, as well as some international locations.
Associates (Employees) can call in and request certain songs, give shout outs to another associate, etc.
https://www.walmartworld.com/content/walmart-world/en_us/rad...
Disclosure: Used to work at Walmart Corporate.
https://www.wired.com/1994/04/radio-microsoft/ (check out those single-digit wait times.)
I worked there when it was still going, but I don't recall if it was employee-accessible or not. I seem to have some vague recollection of having heard it, but I might have been actually making a support call for a product.
3 days a week for what felt like a whole year I was hearing that "Hot and fresh out the kitchen" song. I think it was about sex.
LEO, the first business computer system in the world, built in 1951 by J. Lyons & Co to calculate the cost of cake ingredients.
(I’d assumed this was a global thing, but it seems to mostly just be the UK and Ireland.)
