You have thirty locations. Corporate picked a music vendor three years ago. Nobody remembers who signed the contract or what the playlist is supposed to accomplish. The store managers in your strongest locations turned the volume down to almost nothing. The ones in your weakest locations let the staff connect a phone to the speakers.
You are not alone. This is the default state of in-store audio for most multi-location retailers in 2026.
The Genre Trap #
Search “best music for retail stores” and you will find lists. Jazz for upscale. Pop for energy. Lo-fi for calm. Indie for boutiques. These lists are not useless, but the people writing them skip the hard part.
Two stores can play the same genre and get opposite results. A boutique in SoHo and a boutique in a suburban strip mall serve different customers who walked in with different expectations. The genre is the same. The effect is not.
Ronald Milliman published a study in 1982 showing that slower-tempo music in grocery stores correlated with a 38% increase in sales compared to faster-tempo music. That finding has been replicated and extended for four decades. The takeaway was never “play slow music.” The takeaway was that specific musical characteristics affect how customers move through a store, how long they stay, and how much they spend. Genre is a package deal. Customers respond to the individual characteristics inside that package, not the label on the outside.
Most guides stop at genre because genre is easy to recommend. Telling a retailer “play jazz” takes one sentence. Helping a retailer figure out what musical characteristics match their specific customer base takes real work.
What Your Store Is Probably Playing Right Now #
Walk into your own stores this week. Do not tell anyone you are coming. Stand near the entrance for sixty seconds and listen.
Here is what operators typically find. The volume is either too loud or so low it disappears under the HVAC noise. The playlist has not changed in months. At least one location has a staff member’s phone plugged in, playing whatever they want. The music has no relationship to the merchandise, the season, or the customer walking through the door.
None of this is malicious. It happens because nobody owns the audio experience. Visual merchandising has a team. Window displays have a budget. Store layout gets reviewed quarterly. The music? Somebody set it up once and moved on.
The cost of that neglect is invisible until you start measuring. Customers who leave sooner than they should. Browsing sessions that never convert. A brand that sounds like an afterthought because the audio is one.
Is it legal to play your background music? #
Before you worry about what to play, make sure you are playing it legally. This trips up more retailers than you would expect.
Consumer streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music are licensed for personal use. Playing them in a commercial space violates their terms of service and, more importantly, violates public performance licensing requirements under ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The fine per infringement can reach $30,000 per song. Enforcement has increased since 2023, and performing rights organizations have specifically targeted multi-location retailers.
The legally safe options fall into a few categories.
Licensed commercial music services. Companies like Mood Media, Rockbot, and Soundtrack Your Brand hold blanket licenses that cover public performance rights. You pay a monthly subscription per location, and the licensing is handled. Pricing ranges from around $15 per month for basic services to $50 or more per location for curated solutions. These services give you genre channels, seasonal playlists, and basic scheduling.
Direct PRO licensing. You can license directly from ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC and play music from any source. This works for single locations but becomes an administrative burden at scale. You need all three licenses, and the fees are calculated by square footage, number of locations, and sometimes by revenue.
Original music. Music composed specifically for commercial use, where the rights are built into the service agreement, eliminates the licensing question entirely. No PRO fees. No catalog restrictions. No risk of an artist pulling their songs from a platform and leaving a gap in your rotation. This is the newest category and the smallest, but retailers who adopt it never think about PRO fees again.
What to Look for in a Music Provider #
If you are evaluating providers or reconsidering your current one, here are the questions worth asking.
Does the provider cover all public performance licensing, or are you responsible for separate PRO agreements? Some vendors bundle it. Some do not. Read the contract.
Can you get reporting on what actually played in each store? If your provider cannot tell you what ran last Tuesday at your Scottsdale location, they are not giving you control. They are giving you a radio station.
Does the music change, or is it the same rotation every week? Repetition is the fastest way to turn your staff against the audio. Employees hear the same songs hundreds of times. Your staff carry that fatigue into every customer interaction. Ask how frequently the catalog refreshes and whether there is a mechanism to prevent the same track from repeating within a shift.
Is there any connection between the music and your store’s performance data? Most providers do not offer this. The ones that do are worth a closer look, because the difference between “music that sounds right” and “music that performs” is the difference between a guess and a measurement.
What You Can Do This Week #
Walk three of your stores unannounced. Stand inside the entrance for sixty seconds. Write down what you hear, how loud it is, and whether it matches what you would want a first-time customer to feel. Then ask the store manager who controls the music and when it was last updated.
For the broader research record on this, see The Science Behind the Soundtrack.
