Playing background music in your retail store can lead to plenty of tangible benefits, including the potential for bigger purchases and repeat business. Music can also lead to intangible benefits, including an improved atmosphere and a reduction in unwanted noises.
Keep reading to find out more about why you should consider music for retail stores and how to craft the perfect playlist.
8 Reasons You Should Have Background Music in Your Retail Space
Why should you fill your retail space with music? The benefits are plentiful. Here are just a few of them:
1. Enhance Your Store’s Atmosphere
Music has a deep impact on mood. For example, in 2024, researchers distributed a questionnaire to 100 people via social media and asked them about their mood while listening to music. They found that the right songs had a significant impact on listeners’ moods and emotional well-being. You can put this research to work for you and create the right customer atmosphere with music.
Music can welcome people into your store and make them feel calm, focused, and ready to shop. For example, music in a grocery store could help to reduce shoppers’ anxiety and help them have fun while they fill up their carts. The better your customers feel in your store, the more likely they are to purchase more things.
2. Improve the Customer Experience
Play the right type of music, and your customers could be encouraged to linger (and perhaps spend a little more). If you run a clothing store, that small shift could result in a few more shirts sold. If you run a shopping center, it could mean enticing people to look into yet another open shop. The improved atmosphere can also improve your bottom line.
Research backs this up. For example, in a study conducted in 2016, researchers played several different types of music in five sports apparel stores. They found that unfamiliar music made people stay longer, likely because they weren’t aware of how long they’d been shopping when they couldn’t sing along to the tunes.
3. Influence Purchasing Behavior
While music can help to set the tone, you can also use your speakers to share important messages about sales and benefits with your customers. For example, if you’re running an automotive shop, you could share messages about the tires you have on sale and encourage customers to buy them.
Finding the right overhead messaging is important. For example, in 2019, researchers examined the impact of price-based and name-based overhead announcements in an ice cream shop. They found that promotions with no price attached resulted in more sales than those that had the price attached to them.
It may take you time to find the right messages to share in your overhead program. But doing so could lead to big benefits. Conduct some tests and track the results to find out what works best for your store.
4. Build Brand Identity & Awareness
Music can tell your customers a lot about who you are and what you stand for, especially if they’ve never visited your store before. As researchers wrote in 2006, “Consumers view music as an important signaling cue to the brand's position, image and quality.”
Find the right playlist, and you’ll deepen your brand perception for your customers. Audio branding could be the best way to help you enter a new market as well.
5. Manage Customer Flow
In some environments, such as big box stores, customers seem to come in waves. At times, you have more people inside your facility than you can handle. At other times, you have empty aisles. Music and messaging can help to manage this.
When the store is full, you can use messaging to help customers find open cashier aisles. When the store is a little empty, you could share information about sales to encourage people to go deeper into the store. Your messaging can change in a moment based on current needs.
6. Increase Productivity From Team Members
It’s easy to focus exclusively on customers when considering music for business. However, music can also have a deep impact on your employees.
Research conducted at Virginia Commonwealth University suggests that music can not only make employees more productive, but it can make them happier while on the job too. The researchers said this: “The lesson is really that no music will hurt performance, and anything that keeps you awake will help.” A better overall environment for employees often results in increased efficiency and better employee retention rates.
7. Mask Unwanted Noises
Some retail environments are loud. Your facility may have noisy machinery, chatty customers, or bossy staffers. All of that noise could entice your customers to leave without buying anything. Music comes with sound-masking qualities that might help. Instead of listening to the noise of your facility, customers can listen to the songs instead.
8. Encourage Repeat Visits & Customers
Imagine that a customer heads into your retail environment and hears a song they love. Are they likely to come back again? You bet they are. People appreciate places filled with songs that they like, and they tend to avoid those that feature music they don’t like or that don’t have music at all. Repeat customers also means the potential for more business and sales.
References
The Impact of Music on Mood: Descriptive Observations of Listening Experiences and Their Effect on Mental Health. (March 2024). IOASD Journal of Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
The Effect of in Store Music on Shopping Behavior in a Retail Setting. (2016). Management Dynamics.
Developing In-Store Brand Strategies and Relational Expression Through Sales Promotions. (March 2019). Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services.
In-Store Music and Consumer-Brand Relationships: Relational Transformation Following Experiences of (Mis)Fit. (September 2006). Journal of Business Research.
Working to the Beat: How Music Can Make Us More Productive. (May 2019). Virginia Commonwealth University.
Music Use for Mood Regulation: Self-Awareness and Conscious Listening Choices in Young People With Tendencies to Depression. (May 2019). Frontiers in Psychology.
The Psychological Functions of Music Listening. (August 2013). Frontiers in Psychology.