The music in your room is doing more work than you think. It sets the mood, it decides how long people stay, and it tells them, quietly, how much thought you have put into their visit. A Spotify playlist left running behind the counter, the same sort you might play at home, can undo all of that without you ever noticing. Here is why, and what to do instead.
Have you ever sat down somewhere for a quiet coffee, settled in, and then heard an advert start playing over the speakers? An advert, in the middle of your afternoon, in someone else's cafe. Have you ever been somewhere nice and had a song come on that just felt wrong for the room, too loud, too jarring, too much, so that you found yourself shifting in your seat without quite knowing why?
Most of us have. And here is the important part: you noticed. You did not study it or write it down, but some part of you registered that the place had stopped feeling comfortable. You might have finished your drink a little quicker. You might not have gone back.
Your customers are having exactly that experience in your venue, and they are no more likely to mention it than you were.
That is what makes the music so easy to get wrong. When it is wrong, hardly anyone will complain. They just feel a little less at home, finish up a bit sooner, and you never find out why. But when it is right, it works the other way entirely, and it does far more than most owners ever realise.
It is rarely a decision. It is usually a phone or a laptop behind the counter, signed into Spotify or a similar music app, playing a playlist someone put together for themselves at home. It gets switched on in the morning and left to run. And an app made for one person listening on the sofa was never built to run a room full of customers.
None of this shows up on a spreadsheet, which is exactly why it gets missed. But the effects are real, and they all work against you.
Music that does not suit the room costs you straight away. Too lively when people want to settle, too flat when the place needs some energy, and they finish up and drift out a little sooner without ever saying why.
Then there is what the music says about you. You have thought about the coffee, the food if you serve it, the lighting, the chairs, the decor. The sound in the room is part of that same picture, and a stranger's advert cutting across it works against everything else you have done. It tells the customer, without a word, that their experience was an afterthought.
Start with the part that is not a matter of taste at all, because it has been measured. When the music in a room is slower and softer, people relax and stay longer. A 2024 field study tracked 282 tables in a working restaurant. With slow music, diners stayed an average of 80 minutes, about 40 per cent longer than the tables with fast music and about 16 per cent longer than the restaurant's normal playlist. Earlier work by Ronald Milliman put the difference at around a quarter more time in the room. Faster, louder music does the reverse and moves people on. None of this depends on anyone consciously listening. It works on the couple deep in conversation who would swear they never noticed a note.
The same study is worth quoting for what it did not find. Slow music kept people in 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.
That dwell time effect is the one to build on. A room with the right music in it feels warm and welcoming, and people relax more easily without thinking about why. That works on every customer, on every visit, whether the place is packed or there are two people in for an afternoon coffee.
Then there is something you cannot promise, but you can make room for it. Think of a place you remember for how it felt. A bar on holiday, a cafe you kept drifting back to, somewhere the music sat so perfectly with the moment that it became part of the memory. Not everyone feels a place that deeply, and that is fine. But for the ones who do, that is how a venue stops being somewhere they went and becomes somewhere they loved. You do not get moments like that from a playlist on shuffle.
Nobody walks in and says the music is perfect. They just stay longer, come back sooner, and tell a friend the place is lovely.
There is a separate reason too, and this one is not a matter of taste. Spotify's own terms say the service is for personal, non-commercial use, and Spotify states plainly that you cannot play it publicly in a business such as a bar, restaurant, shop or salon. Upgrading to Premium does not change that, and it is why Spotify itself points businesses to a different service. There is a catch that is easy to miss here, because paying a music licence does not fix it, and we go through the whole thing in can you legally play Spotify in your venue. For the wider licensing picture, our music licensing guide and quick licence checker cover it in plain English.
The change is simple. Stop playing music chosen for you, and start playing music chosen for the room and the moment. No adverts, ever. Something that suits a cafe or a bar or a shop rather than one person's phone. Something that changes as the day changes, gentle at opening, livelier through the busy hours, calmer again before close. And something you can genuinely leave running, so it looks after itself while you look after your customers.
That is exactly what SoundPour is. It is original music made to be played in venues, not borrowed from a personal account. It shapes itself around your trading day, it never plays an advert, and once it is set up it simply runs. You can try the player yourself in a couple of minutes, or start a free 60-day beta and hear it in your own room.
Spotify’s own terms say the service is for personal, non-commercial use, and Spotify states that you cannot play it publicly in a business. Beyond the terms, a personal playlist is built around one person’s taste rather than a room, the free version of the app plays adverts, and a playlist left on shuffle sounds the same at eight in the morning as it does at the lunch rush. Our music licensing guide explains how licensing works in general, and what that means for your venue is between you and PPL PRS.
It can change how long people stay and how they feel. A 2024 field study in a working restaurant found that slow music kept diners in longer, but it made no difference to the size of the bill. So be wary of any promise that music will raise what each customer spends.
There is no single answer, because the right music depends on the kind of place, the mood you want and the time of day. A calm café morning, a busy lunch and a quiet late afternoon each call for something different. The useful step is to choose music for the room and the moment rather than for your own taste, and to let it change across the day.
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