What Music Does in a Room
Every customer in a commercial space hears the music, and almost nobody consciously evaluates it. It sets the pace of a room and tells people what kind of business they have walked into.
We supply fully licensed background music for businesses. Playlists are built around your brand and your trading hours.
If your internet drops
Every player keeps 5 to 10 minutes of music buffered, so a router reboot or a brief drop passes without anyone in the room noticing.
For longer outages there is an add-on you can put on any plan: the player then holds 7 to 10 days of audio and keeps running the last schedule it was given. It costs extra because storing that much music carries a higher licensing fee than streaming it.
Either way a player has to reach us at least once every 30 days to renew the license on its content, so one left off the network for a month will stop.
What it costs
$39 per zone, per month. Month to month, no contract.
Our player is $129 with six months of service included. Multi-zone buildings get a specified and installed system — Sonos, Ubiquiti PowerAmp-class hardware or a comparable multi-zone amplifier — quoted per building. Anything that already plays a stream can use a stream URL from us instead, with no hardware cost.
Existing amplifiers and speakers keep working. Full pricing.
Why Choose Our Background Music Service?
- 100% Licensed - No ASCAP, BMI or SESAC performance fees on the music we supply. We handle the licensing.
- Curated for Business - Playlists built for commercial rooms, not for personal listening.
- Brand-Matched - We choose the music with you, to fit your brand and your customers.
- Easy Scheduling - Set different playlists for different times of day, days of the week, or special occasions.
- Reliable Streaming - Continuous playback, with buffering that covers a brief drop in connectivity.
What the Research Says
Music does change customer behavior. The effect is narrower and more specific than the numbers that circulate on vendor websites.
Tempo changes the pace people move at. In the Journal of Marketing field experiment that founded this field, supermarket shoppers covered the same stretch of floor in about 128 seconds while slow-tempo music was playing and about 109 seconds under fast-tempo music. The no-music condition sat between the two and differed significantly from neither, and the author explicitly warned against generalizing his figures.
Rooms with music score better than rooms without — modestly. A meta-analysis of 66 experiments in the Journal of Retailing, covering 15,621 participants, found spaces with music rate higher on pleasure, satisfaction, and intention to return than spaces without. The authors describe the strength of those effects as small to medium, and they were stronger in service settings than in pure retail.
The bigger difference is well-chosen music versus badly chosen music. The largest field study of the question — 1.8 million transactions across 16 Stockholm restaurants, run by HUI Research with the music provider Soundtrack Your Brand — found that playlists selected to fit the brand produced 9.1% higher revenue than playlists of randomly chosen popular songs. Two caveats: the comparison is good music against bad music, not music against silence, and the study was funded by a music service.
That is why we build playlists around your brand and your hours. Fit is the part the evidence supports.