How to Choose Music for Your Retail Store

Walk into ten stores on the same block and you will hear ten different music strategies. One has a Spotify playlist running through a Bluetooth speaker behind the register. Another has the same satellite radio channel it signed up for in 2019. A third plays nothing at all because the last manager turned the speakers off and nobody noticed.

All three have something in common. Nobody chose the music based on the customer.

That is the gap. Most guides to retail music start with genre recommendations. Play jazz for upscale, play pop for teens, play acoustic for organic grocery. Those recommendations are not wrong, exactly, but they skip the question that matters: who is your customer, and what do you want them to do while they are in your store?

Two stores can sell similar products to people with identical demographics and need completely different music. A 34-year-old woman shopping for premium skincare in a curated boutique and a 34-year-old woman buying running shoes in a sporting goods store look the same on a census form. Their mindsets at the moment of purchase have almost nothing in common.

The skincare shopper is browsing. She wants to linger, discover, feel like the space was designed for someone like her. The running shoe shopper knows what she needs. She wants to find it, try it, and get out. Music that encourages one will frustrate the other.

Before picking a genre or a playlist, operators need to answer a few questions about each location. Are your customers here to browse or to buy? Do you want them to slow down or move efficiently? Does your brand position as aspirational, practical, or somewhere between? The music should match those answers, not the store manager’s commute playlist.

This is the part most commercial music services skip entirely. They hand you a catalog of mood channels and let you pick by genre label. That is like choosing your visual merchandising by asking the cashier what colors they like.

Ronald Milliman published a study in 1982 showing that slower background music caused shoppers to move more slowly through a store, spend more time inside, and spend significantly more money. The finding has been replicated across decades and retail categories. Tempo affects how people move through a physical space. That part is not controversial.

A wine shop study by North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick in 1999 found that French music caused French wine to outsell German wine five to one. German music reversed the ratio. Customers denied being influenced. The music was shaping purchasing decisions below conscious awareness.

Volume matters, too. Research going back to Smith and Curnow in 1966 has consistently found that loud music causes shoppers to leave faster. The threshold is lower than most managers assume. If two customers standing six feet apart have to raise their voices to hear each other, the music is working against you.

None of this is proprietary. It is published, peer-reviewed, and available to anyone who looks for it. The question for operators is simpler: are you using any of it, or are you guessing?

Store managers default to familiar music because it feels safe. Employees prefer it because they recognize it. Customers seem to respond to it. But the research tells a different story.

Yalch and Spangenberg found in 2000 that customers exposed to familiar music perceived their shopping trip as longer than it actually was. Customers exposed to unfamiliar music underestimated how long they had been shopping. The first group left sooner. The second group stayed longer.

For operators, this creates a tension worth paying attention to. The music that makes the store feel comfortable to the staff may be the music that is quietly pushing customers toward the door. Music that is stylistically appropriate but not individually recognizable tends to keep shoppers in the store longer, because their internal clock does not register each song as a time marker.

This is one reason original music has an advantage over licensed catalogs in specialty retail. Every track is new to the listener.

If your stores run Spotify, Apple Music, or any consumer streaming service through the speakers, you are violating copyright law. Consumer subscriptions are licensed for personal use. Playing them in a commercial space requires separate performance licenses from ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC.

Penalties start at $750 per song and can reach $150,000 for willful infringement. ASCAP and BMI employ field investigators who visit retail locations. This is not a theoretical risk.

Commercial music services, typically between $17 and $80 per month per location, include the necessary licenses. That is the minimum compliant option. Some retailers use royalty-free libraries. Others commission original music. The point is not which path you pick. The point is that “the manager’s Spotify account” is not a path at all.

For a deeper breakdown of the legal landscape, see Can You Play Spotify in Your Store? and The Hidden Cost of Your Licensing Fee.

Walk your stores. Not as a manager checking fixtures. As a customer. Stand at the entrance and listen. Ask yourself: does the music match the person you want shopping here? Is it too loud? Too quiet? Does it sound like someone chose it, or does it sound like it has been running on autopilot?

Ask your team three questions. Who chose the current music? When was the last time anyone changed it? Has anyone ever looked at whether the music correlates with sales performance at different locations?

Most operators discover that nobody can answer the third question. That gap between “we play music” and “we know what the music does” is where the real opportunity sits.

You do not need new technology to start paying attention. You need to treat music like you treat every other variable in the store: something worth measuring.

Operators would never run a visual merchandising program without looking at the sales data afterward. Window displays get tested, endcaps get rotated, floor layouts get adjusted based on what moves. Music gets left alone.

The vendors who dominate the retail music space today sell playlists. They do not sell measurement. Ask your current provider for a report showing how their music selection correlates with your store performance data. Most cannot produce one.

That absence is worth noticing. If nobody is measuring whether the music is helping or hurting, then the decision about what to play is not really a decision at all. It is a habit.

Choosing music for a retail store is not a creative exercise. It is an operational one. The inputs are your customer’s psychology, your brand positioning, and the behavior you want to encourage. The question is whether anyone at your company treats it that way.