Beautiful music

Beautiful music (sometimes abbreviated as BM, B/EZ or BM/EZ for "beautiful music/easy listening") is a mostly instrumental music format that was prominent in American radio from the 1960s through the 1980s. Easy listening, light music, mood music, elevator music, and Muzak are other terms that overlap with this format and the style of music that it featured. Beautiful music can also be regarded as a subset of the middle of the road radio format.

Beautiful music initially offered soft and unobtrusive instrumental selections on a very structured schedule with limited commercial interruptions. It often functioned as a free background music service for stores, with commercial breaks consisting only of announcements aimed at shoppers already in the stores. This practice was known as "storecasting" and was very common on the FM dial in the 1940s and 1950s.

Many of these FM stations usually simulcast their AM station and used a subcarrier (SCA) to transmit a hitch-hiker signal to a store receiver by subscription. The signal was usually a slow-moving audio tape of "background music" or Muzak-type service, which was independent of the simulcast AM signal.

Some FM stations made more income from these music subscriptions than from their main programming. WITH-FM, in Baltimore, Maryland (1950s and 1960s), had to keep its FM carrier on the air until 2AM for restaurant subscribers, and could not sign-off the main FM carrier until that time and thus had to run a repeat of its previous day's evening concert on its main FM program line.

One of the first beautiful music radio stations in the US was KIXL (pronounced "Kick-sil") in the Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas area. As early as 1947 it played orchestral music on AM radio (1040), and later on FM (104.5). The format endured a name change to KEZL (as in "easy listening") in 1973, but ended with a change to adult contemporary in 1976.

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