You chose the chairs. You chose the cups, the paint, the lighting, the wording on the menu. Almost nobody chooses the music. It arrives by accident, from a phone behind the counter, and then it plays to every single person who walks through your door for the next ten years. Here are the seven mistakes that follow from that, what the evidence actually says about each one, and what to do instead.
None of these are stupid mistakes. Every one of them is the sensible thing to do when you have forty other jobs on and the music is the smallest of them. But the music is the only part of your venue that touches every customer, continuously, for the whole time they are with you, and it is the only part you can change this afternoon for nothing. That is an unusual combination, and it is worth twenty minutes of your attention.
This is the big one, and it is the hardest to accept, because your taste is probably good. That is not the point. The music in your venue is not there to express you. It is there to do a job on a room full of people who are not you, on a wet Tuesday, half of whom are trying to have a conversation.
The useful question is not "do I like this?" It is "what is this room for, right now, and does this music help?" If you want people to stay longer, you need different music from a place that wants to turn tables quickly. A shop where people browse wants something different from a bar at half past nine. Once you ask the question that way, the answer stops being a matter of taste and starts being a matter of fit.
There is a well known study behind this idea, and it is worth knowing both what it found and how far it goes. Researchers put French and German music on alternate days next to a supermarket wine display, and sales shifted towards the matching country, with shoppers reporting no awareness that the music had influenced them. It is a lovely finding and it gets quoted everywhere. It is also one display, over two weeks, and the enormous percentage figures that circulate online come from a very small number of bottles. Treat it as an illustration that music and surroundings affect each other, not as proof that a playlist can control what people buy.
Your taste is the wrong tool for this job. Not bad taste. Wrong tool.
Most articles like this one will tell you, at this point, to turn the music down. We are not going to, because the evidence does not actually support saying that to every venue.
Here is what it does support. When music is slower and softer, people relax and stay longer. Work by Ronald Milliman put that difference at roughly a quarter more time in the room. A 2024 field study measured it properly, across 282 tables in a working restaurant. With slow music, diners stayed an average of 80 minutes. That is about 40 per cent longer than the tables with fast music, and about 16 per cent longer than the restaurant's normal playlist. If you run a cafe and you want a second coffee ordered, that is the thing to change.
One thing that study did not find is worth saying out loud. Slow music kept people in the restaurant longer, but it made no difference to the size of the bill. Longer visits, same spend per visit. Anyone who tells you background music will directly increase what each customer spends is going further than the evidence does.
Now the other side. A field experiment in two bars, run by Nicolas Guéguen, raised the music from a normal 72 decibels to a loud 88 and watched what happened to young men drinking beer. They drank more, and faster: an average of 3.4 drinks instead of 2.6, and around twelve minutes per glass instead of fifteen (summary of the study). Loud music did not drive anybody out. It sped them up.
Two honest caveats. That study watched forty men in two venues on three evenings, so it is a signal and not a law. And "turn it up so they drink faster" is not a strategy any responsible licensee should want, whatever the numbers say. We mention it because it demolishes the lazy advice, not because we recommend it.
So the mistake is not the volume itself. It is that almost nobody chooses it. The volume sits where the last person left it, and nobody has decided what the music is there to do. Work out what you want from each part of your day, whether that is quiet and relaxed or busy and quick, then set the volume and the tempo to match. Making that decision matters more than any number we could give you.
One caveat, because it is the thing people usually run into first. If the volume will not stay where you put it, and somebody keeps adjusting it through the day, that is a separate fault and no setting will cure it. It means the tracks are not the same loudness as each other, which we cover in why one track sounds louder than the next. Get that right first, then choose your level.
Your customer hears twenty minutes of your music. Your staff hear all of it, every shift, for as long as they work for you. This is the mistake with the strongest evidence behind it and the least attention paid to it.
A 2025 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, led by Kathleen Keeler and Harshad Puranik, followed sixty-eight people working in retail, dining and office settings, surveying them daily for three weeks. On days when the background music did not fit what they needed, in volume, pace, complexity or emotional intensity, they reported less pleasant mood and more mental exhaustion. It showed in their work too: they moved more slowly, were less likely to help colleagues, and were more likely to speak negatively about the workplace (the paper, or a plain English summary). The effect was strongest for people who find it hard to tune background noise out at all, and plenty of your team will be in that group without ever having mentioned it.
Read that as a hiring and retention issue, because that is what it is. In a trade that struggles to keep good people, the music you make them listen to for eight hours is not a small thing. Ask them. They will have opinions they have never volunteered, because it feels like too petty a thing to raise.
This follows straight on. A playlist of four or five hours feels generous when you build it. Across an eight hour shift it plays twice. Across a working week your staff hear the same songs, in roughly the same order, thirty or forty times.
Customers rarely catch this, because they are not in long enough. The people serving them catch every repeat, and the regular who comes in at the same time each Thursday starts to catch it too. If you have ever heard a member of staff say "not this one again", you have already had the feedback and it cost you nothing.
If the music is coming from a free consumer account, adverts are coming with it. Several times an hour, in the middle of somebody's lunch, in the room you have spent years making feel like yours.
Think about what that actually communicates. You have thought hard about the coffee, the food, the chairs, the light. Then a stranger's advert cuts across all of it, and occasionally it is an advert for a business that does the same thing you do, a mile down the road, playing on your speakers, at your expense. Nobody will complain about it. They will not consciously think about it, but the place will feel cheaper to them.
Nobody walks out over an advert. They just come back a bit less often, and never tell you why.
A venue is not one room. The same room has four or five completely different jobs to do during the day. In the first hour, someone wants a quiet corner, a coffee and no conversation. At the lunch rush, the room is full and loud and the music has to work harder to be heard. In the quiet middle of the afternoon, the place needs some energy. In the last hour, you want people to wind down.
Shuffle does not know any of that. It plays the same music at every one of those times, so it is wrong at least three times a day, and the times it is wrong are the times you can least afford it. Getting this right across the day is genuinely the highest-value change on this list, and it is also the one that takes real effort by hand, which is exactly why almost nobody does it.
The last one is not about atmosphere at all, and it is easy to miss even if you thought you had already sorted this out.
There are two separate things going on. The first is public performance, which in the UK is generally handled through TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS. The second is the terms of the service you are actually playing from. Consumer music apps are typically licensed for personal listening, not for playing to a room of customers, and holding a music licence does not change what a given service's own terms permit. Spotify, for instance, states plainly that its personal service is not for public performance in a business, and points businesses elsewhere.
We are not going to tell you where your own venue stands, because that depends on your circumstances and it is not ours to say. What we can do is set out the framework clearly and point you at the people who can answer it properly. Our music licensing guide covers the whole picture in plain English, the free licence checker walks you through six questions and gives you the exact things to ask PPL PRS, and can you legally play Spotify in your venue goes through this particular catch in detail.
Put the seven back together and they point at one thing. Music chosen for the room rather than for you. Volume and pace that match what you want that part of the day to do. Enough music that nobody hears it repeat. Music your staff can listen to all day without getting sick of it. And no adverts, ever. Music that changes as your day changes, from opening to close. And music you can prove you are allowed to play.
You can build all of that yourself. It takes a serious amount of listening and a fair amount of admin, and it is the sort of job that gets started in January and abandoned by March. Or you can have it built for you. That is what SoundPour is: original music made to be played in venues rather than borrowed from a personal account, shaped around your trading day, with no adverts and nothing to install. Try the player yourself in a couple of minutes, or start a free 60-day beta and hear it in your own room.
If you want the longer argument behind mistakes one to six, is a playlist really right for your venue goes deeper into what the music is doing to your customers while nobody is paying attention.
It depends on what you want the room to do. A restaurant field study found that slower music kept diners in their seats longer. A small field experiment in two bars found that louder music led to faster drinking and more drinks ordered, which we mention as a finding, not something we would recommend. Neither is right for every venue. The mistake is never deciding what the room is for, and leaving the volume wherever the last person left it.
Yes, and it is the effect most often overlooked. A 2025 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology followed people working in retail, dining and office settings for three weeks. On days when the music did not fit what they needed, they reported a less pleasant mood and more mental exhaustion, moved more slowly and spoke more negatively about the workplace. A customer hears twenty minutes of your music. Your staff hear all of it, every shift.
Not necessarily, because two separate things are involved. One is playing music in public, which in the UK is generally licensed through TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS. The other is the terms of the service you play the music from: consumer music apps are typically for personal listening, not for playing to customers, and a music licence does not change those terms. What that means for your venue is between you and PPL PRS, and what a service allows is set out in its own terms.
SoundPour is original background music made for venues, shaped around your day, with no adverts and nothing to install. Start a free 60-day beta and we will set up your player, usually within 24 hours, or try the player first to get a feel for it.
Start your free betaor email us directly: hello@soundpour.co.uk