Why is customer service waiting music on the phone so low quality?
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Some of the other posters are pretty much covering it.
The ELI5 is: the phone lines run multiple calls on each physical line, so each call’s quality is dropped to allow for more calls to go through at once.
The detailed explanation is that phone lines were originally designed with a type of multiplexing called Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-division_multiple_access
Multiplexing is a method to allow multiple signals across the same wire. FDMA is a way of dividing the frequency going across the wire into smaller channels. Now each channel was assigned a frequency range to be large enough that voice wouldnt be distorted but small enough to allow for multiple signals at once. Since instruments and music have sounds at a larger range than the voice, music can sound muted and flat on a phone line.
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