Somebody in your venue keeps reaching for the volume. Down, because a track has come in far louder than the one before it. Then up again a few minutes later, because the next one is so quiet nobody can hear it over the coffee machine. Everybody assumes that is just what music is like. It is not. It is a fault, it has a name, and it is measurable.
This is the part that surprises people. If the room keeps needing adjusting, the instinct is to look for the right volume setting, as though one exists and you have not found it yet. You could have the setting exactly right and still be adjusting it all day, because the thing that is changing is not your amplifier. It is the music.
Every recording is mastered at whatever level the people who made it decided on. A track finished for a nightclub is deliberately loud. A softly recorded acoustic piece is deliberately not. Both are correct. Play them back to back through the same speakers at the same setting and the room lurches, and the only tool anybody has to hand is the knob.
Set it once, and if it still needs touching, the music is the problem.
A jump in volume does something specific to a room: it makes people notice the music. Background music works when nobody is thinking about it, and the fastest way to break that is a track that arrives noticeably bigger than the one before. Everyone glances up. Conversation pauses for a beat. It is a small thing that happens forty times a day.
It is worse for the people working there. A customer hears a handful of these. Staff hear all of them, every shift, alongside everything else they are keeping track of. A 2025 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, led by Kathleen Keeler and Harshad Puranik, surveyed people working in retail, dining and office settings every day for three weeks. On days when the background music did not fit what they needed, they reported a less pleasant mood and more mental exhaustion, and it showed in their work (the paper, or a plain English summary). The researchers make the point that staff have little control over music chosen for customers. Music somebody has to keep correcting all day is exactly that, with the added indignity of having to keep correcting it.
There is also a quieter cost. Because the loud tracks are the ones that force a correction, the level gets set for those. The rest of the day then plays too quiet, and the room ends up flatter than you intended for the sake of a handful of outliers.
Loudness has been properly measurable for years. The standard is LUFS, Loudness Units relative to Full Scale, defined in ITU-R BS.1770 and used across European broadcasting under EBU R128. It is not peak level and it is not a volume slider. It is a model of how loud a recording actually sounds to a person, averaged across the whole thing, with more weight given to the frequencies human hearing is most sensitive to.
The useful part for a venue is the scale. One unit is roughly the smallest difference most people would notice. Two or three units is the difference that makes somebody reach for the knob. A consumer music library can contain tracks eight or ten units apart, which is the difference between comfortable and startling.
Two other numbers are worth knowing, because loudness alone does not describe everything:
You do not need equipment. You need one shift and a bit of discipline.
Two or three notes across a shift is normal, because rooms genuinely do get busier and quieter. Ten notes, alternating up and down, is not a volume problem at all. That is a library where the tracks disagree with each other, and no setting will fix it.
Turn on volume normalisation if your music app has it. It is usually in the playback settings and it genuinely helps. Two limits are worth knowing. It normally applies only while you are playing through that particular app, so it does nothing about music from anywhere else, and some versions raise quiet tracks by applying gain, which can lift hiss and room noise along with the music. It is a correction applied at the end rather than a library that agreed with itself in the first place.
Deal with the outliers rather than the average. The trouble can come from a small number of tracks well away from everything else. Finding those handful and removing them does more for the room than adjusting anything globally.
Watch the quiet ones as much as the loud ones. Loud tracks announce themselves and get dealt with. Quiet tracks just disappear, and a track nobody can hear over the coffee machine is doing none of the work you are paying for.
We measure every track in the SoundPour library to the EBU R128 standard, and the result is written onto the file itself, so the loudness, the loudness range and the true peak of any track can be looked up at any time rather than guessed at. Every new track is measured as it joins, so the picture never goes stale.
The point of measuring the whole library rather than sampling it is that it tells us which tracks are the exceptions. The great majority sit close enough together that the change from one to the next is difficult to notice at all. The handful that do not are visible the moment they are measured, and they get dealt with instead of being left in the library in the hope that nobody notices.
That is what it is for. Once you have found the right setting for your ceiling, your speakers and your normal level of busy, it stays right, and the reason nobody is touching the volume is not that they have given up on it.
How loud your music should be in the first place is a genuinely different question, and the honest answer is that it depends on what you want the room to do. The research points in both directions for good reason, and we go through it properly in seven background music mistakes small venues make.
Consistency is the part you can solve once and stop thinking about. Level is the part you set for your room, on the day, with your own ears.
Usually because the tracks are not the same loudness as each other, rather than because anything is wrong with your amplifier or your volume setting. Recordings are mastered at whatever level the people who made them chose, and those levels vary widely. Play them one after another and the room gets louder and quieter on its own, which is why somebody keeps reaching for the volume.
LUFS stands for Loudness Units relative to Full Scale. It is the international standard way of measuring how loud a recording actually sounds to a person, defined in ITU-R BS.1770 and used by broadcasters across Europe under EBU R128. It matters to a venue because two tracks with the same LUFS figure will sound about as loud as each other at the same volume setting. A difference of one unit is roughly the smallest change most people would notice.
It helps a great deal and is worth switching on. Two things limit it. It usually applies only to music played through that app, so it does nothing for anything else, and some apps turn quiet tracks up by adding gain, which can bring up hiss in the recording along with the music. It fixes the problem as the music plays, which is not the same as music that was the same loudness to begin with.
Set the volume once, at a time when the room is at its normal level of busy, and then leave it completely alone for a full shift. Ask staff to note the time whenever they wanted to touch it but did not, and whether they wanted it up or down. Two or three notes in a shift is normal, because rooms get busier and quieter. Many more than that, swinging between up and down, points to tracks that are not the same loudness as each other rather than to the volume setting.
There is no single correct figure, because the right level depends on the room, the ceiling, how full it is and what you want the space to do. What matters far more is that every track sits at the same loudness as every other, so that once you have found the right setting for your room it stays right. Consistency is the part you can fix in the music. The level is the part you set on the day.
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Loudness measured with an implementation of ITU-R BS.1770 / EBU R128 across the whole SoundPour library, and refreshed whenever tracks are added.
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