For retail directors
If you carry the P&L, the audio in your stores is on it.
You already track dwell, basket, conversion, traffic. The one variable affecting all four — and changing every minute the store is open — is the one nobody is measuring.
The Gap
Music has been a vendor line item, not an operating variable.
Your visual merchandising team is well-staffed, well-funded, and well-strategized. Your real estate team has a model for every storefront. Your store ops team owns staffing rotation, scheduling, and the operating hours your floor is open for business. The audio environment those teams operate inside is whatever the music vendor sent over.
Forty years of peer-reviewed research says that audio environment is doing measurable work on the variables you are bonused on. Tempo affects the pace customers move through the store. Music a customer reads as belonging to them moves their willingness to pay. Familiar songs cut perceived dwell. Mismatched music actively reduces basket size. The variable is doing work in the room. The question is whether you chose what.
Two Questions
Ask your current vendor these.
What did the music in our stores contribute to store performance last quarter?
Catalogue vendors cannot answer this. Their selection logic is genre alignment and licensing compliance. They do not connect to your reporting and they do not measure outcomes. If the answer is 'we do not know,' you are paying for an unmeasured environmental variable that is affecting your performance numbers whether your team chose its effect or not.
How is the music in our stores tailored to the customer our stores are built to serve?
Catalogue vendors pick from a library written for an artist's self-expression. The customer profile of the listener was the artist's audience, not your store's customer. There is no parameter-level fit between the music and the customer your reporting tracks. Engineered audio starts from your customer and produces music against that profile on purpose.
What Changes
Same engine. Three deployment shapes.
Spin up Entuned Free in a single store this week — no credit card, no time limit. Pick Linger or Lift Energy and watch what your existing reporting shows for that store against its own trailing baseline. Useful as the first look before a multi-store Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) build.
Move to Boost ($99/location/month) once you want music tailored to a specific customer profile rather than a general catalogue. Most regional retailers run Boost in stores that share a customer profile and deploy multiple ICPs through Professional in stores that don't.
Professional ($399/location/month) integrates with your POS, day-parts the audio against your traffic profile, and refines the music against your store's outcomes as the dataset grows. The lift shows up in the reports you already run.
Enterprise is for across all locations deployments. Custom ICP design, performance guarantees where lift can be cleanly measured, dedicated success contact, white-glove rollout. Standard entry shape is a 12-week pilot in a paired set of test and control stores.
Getting Buy-In
What your CFO will want to see.
Most retail finance teams approve a single-store Entuned Free trial without a procurement conversation — there is no spend. Boost and Professional move on standard SaaS approval ($99 or $399 per location per month, monthly, no long-term contract). Enterprise gets a structured pilot with a written readout against your existing reporting before any across all locations commitment. The financial case sits on the CFO page.
What's Already Running
Currently in pilot with an 80+ store retailer.
Entuned is currently running a deployment with a major mid-market men's fashion retailer with 80+ stores. Multi-store deployment, ICP-tailored audio against the retailer's existing reporting stack. Pilot data accumulating; brand name not yet authorized for public reference.
Related Reading
Go Deeper
The financial case for retail audio · How it works per tier · Enterprise rollouts · The behavioral research · PRO indemnification
Get Started
Three minutes to put music in your store.
Free with Entuned Free. Public pricing at Boost and Professional. Talk to us about Enterprise rollouts.
Start FreeFree forever · no credit card · no time limit. See full pricing → or talk about a multi-store pilot →