For Retail Operators
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. A few ways in.
If you run 5 to 50 locations, the pilot is the entry. We engineer original music for a subset of your stores, run it twelve weeks against matched control locations, and read the result in the reporting you already use. The pilot is free, and it answers the only question that matters before a wider rollout: what does the audio move.
Want a feel before the pilot conversation? Spin up Entuned Free in one store this week — no credit card, no time limit. Pick Linger or Lift Energy and watch what your reporting shows for that store against its own trailing baseline.
Boost ($99/location/month) tailors music to a specific customer profile. Professional ($399/location/month) integrates with your POS, schedules the audio against your traffic profile, and refines against your store's outcomes as the dataset grows. The lift shows up in the reports you already run.
Past 50 locations, Enterprise adds custom ICP design, performance guarantees where lift can be cleanly measured, a dedicated success contact, and white-glove rollout. The entry shape is still 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 free pilot without a procurement conversation — there is no spend, and the readout lands in reporting they already trust. Boost and Professional move on standard SaaS approval ($99 or $399 per location per month, monthly, no long-term contract) for single-store and small deployments. The financial case sits on the CFO page.
Related Reading
Go Deeper
The financial case for retail audio · How it works per tier · Enterprise rollouts · The behavioral research · PRO indemnification
Get Started
Start with a measured pilot across your stores.
If you run 5 to 50 locations, the pilot is how you find out what the audio moves before you commit. Free, twelve weeks, read out in your own reporting. Running a single store or just a few? Entuned Free is live.
Running 5–50 locations? Start a measured pilot. Single store or just a few? Start free · no card · no time limit. See full pricing →