Seeburg put out their famous Seeburg 1000 background music system, which started in 1959 and lasted until 1986. This system utilized unique 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 before moving on to 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 whole stack was completed. Given that the average side is about forty minutes long, eighty minutes per record, twenty-five was more than enough to go the entire day and some without repeat. The records in each machine were initially rotated in sets of seven records quarterly, with the frequency of replacement sets decreasing to bi-annual replacement sets. The number of active records per Seeburg 1000 unit was bumped to twenty-eight in the late 1960s. 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 to twenty dollars per disk to own one of these records. A series of "libraries" 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 more upbeat but mostly made for shopping malls and supermarkets. The Industrial series was created for factories and was typically upbeat and somewhat varied.
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