Walk into most multi-location retailers on any given Tuesday and you will hear one of three things: a personal Spotify account playing through the ceiling speakers, a playlist a manager built six months ago, or whatever the opener felt like putting on that morning. All three have the same thing in common. They are all, in different ways, broken.
The first one is also illegal.
What's actually wrong with your store's playlist? #
Spotify’s terms of service state the platform is for personal, non-commercial use only. Apple Music, Pandora, and Amazon Music carry the same restriction. Playing any of them through store speakers violates the license agreement.
But the license agreement is the minor issue. The U.S. Copyright Act, Title 17 Section 106, requires businesses to obtain public performance licenses from performing rights organizations before playing music in any commercial environment. A personal streaming subscription does not satisfy that requirement.
ASCAP has filed suit against individual bars and restaurants. In Chicago, two venues faced lawsuits seeking $150,000 in damages per song. Most retailers who stream personal accounts in-store are not trying to steal anything. They just do not know. But ignorance has never been a defense under copyright law.
For a 20-location chain, that exposure adds up fast. One song per store, one complaint, and the legal bill dwarfs whatever you were saving by skipping a proper music license.
The Employee DJ #
So the personal streaming account is off the table. The next instinct is usually to hand the music selection to someone on the floor. A manager, a shift lead, whoever seems to have good taste.
Yalch and Spangenberg published a study in the Journal of Consumer Marketing in 1990 that looked at how store music affects shopping behavior. The finding that held up: the relationship between music and customer response depends on the match between the music and the customer demographic. Not the quality of the music. The match.
Employees are almost never a demographic match for the target customer. They tend to be younger. Their taste skews toward whatever they listen to on their own time. When an employee picks the playlist, they are selecting music that makes an eight-hour shift more tolerable for themselves. That is a completely rational thing to do. It also has nothing to do with what a 44-year-old customer browsing for 20 minutes needs to hear.
The person choosing the music is selecting for their own comfort in a space that exists for someone else's experience.
This pattern is consistent across every store that tries it. The question the employee answers is “what do I want to listen to?” The question that matters for the business is “what should this room sound like for the person spending money in it?” Those are different questions with different answers, and no amount of good taste bridges the gap.
The Familiarity Trap #
Most operators assume you should play songs people recognize. Familiar music. Hits. The logic seems obvious: people like songs they know, they feel good, they stay longer.
Yalch and Spangenberg tested this directly. Their 2000 study, published in the Journal of Business Research, measured how familiar versus unfamiliar music affected actual shopping duration.
Shoppers hearing recognizable hits left faster.
The reason is straightforward. When your brain recognizes a song, it engages with the music actively. That heightened engagement makes time feel like it passes more slowly. Shoppers feel like they have been in the store longer than they actually have. So they leave. Unfamiliar music does the opposite. Because the brain is not actively engaging with a known song, the subjective sense of time compresses. Shoppers perceive a shorter visit. But they actually stay longer.
Playing “good songs people know” is probably costing you floor time with every customer who walks in.
What Changes When You Measure It #
Retailers who start treating in-store audio as a measurable variable rather than a background task tend to notice the same things. Customers linger longer in certain zones. Midweek traffic patterns shift. Staff stop fighting over the aux cord because the decision has been taken off their plate entirely.
The research on music and consumer behavior has been building for decades. Milliman showed in 1982 that tempo alone could shift how long grocery shoppers stayed in-store. The evidence base is large enough that the question is no longer whether audio affects behavior. The question is whether anyone at your company is paying attention to it.
A new category of music providers has started to address this. Instead of licensing existing catalogs and hoping something fits, these providers build audio around the specific customer profile and store conditions. Original music, cleared for commercial use from day one, with no PRO licensing exposure. The music changes based on what the store actually needs rather than what someone felt like hearing six months ago.
Something You Can Do This Week #
Pick three stores. Walk in during a weekday afternoon. Write down what you hear. Then ask yourself three questions: Who picked this? When did they pick it? And does anyone know whether it is helping or hurting?
If nobody can answer the third question, that tells you something worth knowing.
This is part of the Sound Check series. The rest of the series sits on the why page.
