A man walked into a clothing store recently to buy shirts. He mentioned to the associate that his wife had just passed away. While they were talking, the speakers were playing Don McLean's "American Pie."
The chorus, which repeats six times across the song's eight minutes: "This'll be the day that I die."
Nobody chose that song to play at that moment. It was on a playlist. It came up in rotation. The algorithm matched the genre and the era. The algorithm did not read the words. And for eight minutes, a man buying shirts after his wife's death stood in a room where the speakers were singing about dying.
That is not a hypothetical. That happened. And it is happening in some version, in some store, right now. Because nobody is reading the lyrics.
The Violence You Can't Hear
Filtering for explicit language is the easy problem. Every playlist service does it. The harder problem is songs that sound pleasant and say something the store would never put on a wall. Songs where the production communicates ease and the lyrics communicate harm. The listener does not need to consciously process the words for them to register. Research on implicit semantic processing has established that lyrical content influences emotional state even in passive listeners who are not attending to the language. The words enter the processing stream whether the customer is paying attention or not.
Sublime, "Santeria." This song sounds like a lazy California afternoon. Warm guitar, laid-back groove, the kind of thing that belongs on a patio. The lyrics describe a man planning to murder his romantic rival and assault his ex-girlfriend. That is playing in stores where women are shopping with their children. The production is so sunny that the violence passes as atmosphere. It has been passing as atmosphere for thirty years.
The Police, "Every Breath You Take." This is still widely understood as a love song. It is not. Sting has confirmed, repeatedly and publicly, that it is written from the perspective of a stalker. The lyric is a detailed description of monitoring someone's every movement. One in three women in the United States has experienced stalking, intimate partner violence, or both. Some of those women are shopping in your store right now, and the speakers are playing a song about a man who will not stop watching. The melody is gorgeous. That is the problem.
Foster the People, "Pumped Up Kicks." A song about a school shooting, delivered in a whistling, laid-back indie pop arrangement. The production is so deliberately cheerful that the song appeared in children's movie trailers before anyone publicly acknowledged what it was about. It is on retail playlists in stores where parents shop with their kids. The violence does not register because the melody has made it invisible.
The Rolling Stones, "Brown Sugar." The opening guitar riff is one of the most recognizable in rock history. The song is about a slave owner raping enslaved women. Mick Jagger himself has said he could never write it today. It has been on classic rock retail playlists for over fifty years. It plays in stores that have DEI statements on their websites. Nobody has pulled it because nobody has read the words since 1971.
The Cognitive Confusion
Violence is the sharpest example, but the broader problem is cognitive incongruence. The music is telling the customer's nervous system one thing and their linguistic processing system something else. The production says relax, browse, stay. The lyrics say die, shoot, stalk, assault. The customer does not consciously notice the contradiction, but their body is processing both signals simultaneously, and the result is a low-grade unease that they cannot attribute to a cause. They just feel like the store was slightly off. They leave a little sooner than they might have.
This extends beyond violence. The Weeknd's "Earned It," which appears on "luxury" and "boutique" playlists because the orchestral production sounds premium, was written for the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack. Lorde's "Royals" is an explicit rejection of aspirational consumption — the chorus mocking the exact lifestyle that premium retail sells — and it plays in premium retail because the production is cool and understated. Nobody read the words.
Beyond Lyrics: When the Sound Itself Is Wrong
The lyric problem is the one people can see once you point at it. There is a sonic problem underneath that does not need words at all.
High-tempo, rhythmically chaotic tracks produce elevated arousal and a sense of urgency that the listener cannot distinguish from anxiety. In a premium retail environment where the purchase requires consideration, this elevated state compresses decision-making and pushes the customer toward the door. The music is telling their nervous system to move faster and leave sooner, independently of what the lyrics say.
Heavily compressed mixes — the loudness war signature of most commercially released music from the mid-2000s forward — produce fatigue over exposures longer than thirty minutes. The dynamic range is crushed flat. Nothing breathes. The listener's body is held at a constant level of activation with no release, and the subconscious response is to leave. Not because the song is bad. Because the sonic texture of the mix is neurologically exhausting at the scale of a full shift.
Why This Keeps Happening
Every one of these songs landed on a retail playlist because an algorithm or a curator matched the genre, the tempo, and the energy. Nobody read the lyrics. Nobody asked what images the words would put in a customer's head while they are holding a product they are deciding whether to buy. Nobody asked whether a woman in the store has a reason to flinch at a song about being watched. Nobody checked whether the man buying shirts just lost his wife.
This is what happens when you source music from a catalog of songs that were written for reasons that have nothing to do with your store. Don McLean was mourning dead musicians. Sublime was writing about revenge and murder. Sting was writing about obsession. The Rolling Stones were writing about slavery and rape. These are legitimate artistic expressions. They have no business playing in your fitting rooms.
When music is generated for a specific environment, this entire category of problem disappears. There are no misread lyrics because the semantic content is composed for the context. There are no accidental images of shootings or stalking or widowed brides. The music says what you want it to say, at the tempo and energy you specify, because nobody else's story is attached to it.
Every song in a catalog carries someone else's intention. Some of those intentions are playing through your speakers right now, and nobody has stopped to listen.
Related reading: The Silent Brand Signal, Music Was Never Made For Your Store, and What Your Music Is Saying About Your Brand.
Key Takeaway: Every catalog song carries someone else's intention — audit what your speakers are actually saying, because lyrics prime your customers whether they are listening or not.
Entuned generates original music with no catalog, no lyrics, and no someone-else's-story attached. Every composition is purpose-built for your store and your customer.
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