Last Sunday I was working the floor at an UNTUCKit store in Park Meadows, south of Denver. I do this. I’m the founder of a company that makes original music engineered for retail stores, and I also work as a sales associate at the store where we’re piloting it. Same floor, two jobs. One of them pays hourly.
A couple walked in. He needed shirts for work. She was browsing, kind of dancing while he tried things on. Standard Sunday traffic. I pulled a dark grey shirt to round out the set he was building and handed it to her.
She looked at it, looked at the pile of shirts already in her arms, and said: “Add it to the pile.”
The song playing overhead, at that exact moment, was saying the same thing. The chorus. “Add it to the pile.”
I know this because I wrote the prompt that generated that song. The track is called “Add It to the Pile.” It’s an Entuned original, and it was playing as part of a mode I built specifically to increase units per transaction. The mode is called Add Items to Cart. Its job is to prime the customer, through lyric content and musical feel, to say yes to one more thing.
She said yes to one more thing. They walked out with four items instead of three.
What happened, in sequence #
She entered the store. The music was already running. She wasn’t paying attention to it the way you pay attention to a song you chose to listen to. She was shopping. But her body was responding. She told me afterward she’d been kind of dancing to it while her husband tried things on. She was singing the chorus in her head without thinking about it.
Then the purchase moment arrived. I handed her an additional item. And the language she reached for, the phrase that came out of her mouth to say “yes, I’ll take it,” was the phrase the music had been putting in her head for the last fifteen minutes.
She didn’t know. It was completely unconscious. The lyric had become her vocabulary for the decision.
After she said it, I told her what had happened. I explained that the song was generated by a music system I’d designed, that the lyric was deliberate, that the entire mode was built to do exactly what it just did. I asked if I could quote her.
She laughed. She wasn’t creeped out. She said: “I was literally singing this song, the chorus to ‘Add It to the Pile,’ and then I saw that other shirt and I thought, why not add it to the pile. This is brilliant.”
Priming, not manipulation #
She was amused. Happy with her purchase. The extra shirt wasn’t something she didn’t want. The music didn’t make her buy something she’d regret. It gave her a frame for a decision she was already close to making. That’s the distinction between manipulation and priming. Manipulation creates a desire that wasn’t there. Priming gives language and momentum to one that was.
This is the mechanism I’ve been building Entuned around. Not playlist curation. Not vibes. Parameterized behavioral music, where every element of the composition, the lyric content, the tempo, the production style, the harmonic structure, is set to produce a specific customer behavior.
The Add Items to Cart mode is one of several I’ve designed. Each mode targets a different retail metric. Dwell time. Conversion. Units per transaction. The modes aren’t playlists with a theme. They’re functional specifications that get translated into original compositions through a prompt architecture I built. The music is generated, not selected. That means every variable is controllable, including what the lyrics actually say.
Most retail music services are catalog-based. They pick songs from a library. That means they’re constrained by whatever some songwriter happened to write. You can filter by tempo, by genre, by mood. But you can’t control what the singer is saying to your customer at the moment they’re deciding whether to add a fourth shirt to the pile. You can’t even get close to that.
I can. And last Sunday, it worked exactly the way I designed it to work.
The channel nobody parameterized #
There’s a body of research on semantic priming. The basic finding is that when people are exposed to a word or concept, they’re faster to recognize related words and more likely to use those concepts in subsequent decisions. It’s one of the most replicated effects in cognitive psychology. What I’m doing is applying it through a channel that nobody in retail has parameterized before: the actual lyric content of the background music.
Background music is the only marketing channel that reaches every customer in the store for the entire duration of their visit. It’s also the only one most retailers treat as an afterthought. They’ll spend thousands on visual merchandising, on signage, on staff training. The music is someone’s phone plugged into an aux cable, or a $40/month service that gives them a playlist they can’t control.
The couple at UNTUCKit last Sunday didn’t walk in planning to buy four shirts. They walked in planning to buy shirts for his work. The music running in the background spent fifteen minutes putting a specific phrase in her head. When the moment came to decide on one more item, she reached for that phrase like it was her own idea.
It was her own idea. The music just made sure the idea had a name.
