There are or were plenty of artists in the background music genre. There are countless hours of instrumental music created by human beings playing actual instruments. The business of background music (Muzak, now Rockbot I think, Trusonic etc) is still a competitive business.
Corporate music, like the stuff you hear at health clubs, malls, parking lot elevators, waiting rooms, you get the idea, is a paid service that generally pays artists.
They license real music and curate playlists for all kinds of settings, and pay royalties to artists via performance royalties collectors like ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GEMA in Germany.
I'm represented by ASCAP and I used to get regular checks, mostly from the EU. Spotify is destroying that business with their royalty free robot generated slop. All the money that used to be distributed through a variety of systems is drying up. Spotify "disrupted" it in the worst way.