What your current audio is doing to the line item it doesn't appear on.
Your stores play music every hour they are open. Ask your current vendor one question. What did the music contribute to store performance this quarter. If they cannot answer, you are paying for an unmeasured environmental variable that is affecting the line items you are measured on.
The numbers behind retail audio.
Conservative scenario
Areni & Kim 1993, North et al. 1999
Peer-reviewed studies
Based on published research
Show the math.
The public research is direct on this. Areni and Kim (1993) and North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick (1999) measured willingness-to-pay lift when music fit the customer and the category. Andersson et al. (2012) watched 601 real transactions and found the opposite condition — music that clashed with the store — actively reduced what customers spent. Your current audio is probably not neutral. Neutral is not the baseline. Neutral is the outcome you would get if nobody was playing anything at all, and that is not what is happening in your stores.
Run the math against your own portfolio. Your average ticket, your transactions per location per month, the number of active locations you operate. Apply a conservative lift assumption from the public research. Then apply a more aggressive one. The spread between the two is what the audio layer is worth on your P&L today, whether anyone in the building is measuring it or not.
The Enterprise pilot.
The vendor-eliminating question.
Mood Media and similar catalogue providers charge multi-year contracts, with termination penalties, no measurement, and no targeting beyond genre tags. Entuned engineers original music for your specific customer and measures the result against your existing reporting infrastructure. One question eliminates most incumbents. What did the music contribute to store performance this quarter.
The pilot as controlled experiment.
The Enterprise tier deploys against a structured pilot — typically 12 weeks across matched test and control stores. Same product mix, same promotional calendar, same time window, measured through the reporting infrastructure your operators already use.
The pilot has its own commercial structure separate from your locations-wide rollout terms. If the numbers do not move against the metrics you set, you walk away with the data and the relationship ends cleanly. Fleet-wide pricing is negotiated as part of the agreement, structured around the deployment shape — number of stores, number of ICPs, integration depth, performance terms.
What the pilot looks like financially.
One question worth asking.
We will walk through the ROI arithmetic against your own store portfolio, your transaction volume, and your average ticket. No deck. Just numbers.
Talk to Enterprise