You can’t simply open up your personal music apps and play any playlist in your business. You must ensure the music you play is properly licensed to play in a commercial setting. If you don’t, you’re likely breaking some laws and putting yourself at risk for huge fines.

Thankfully, it’s easy to secure the right licensing to play music in your business. In this guide, we’ll cover all the ways that music is essential to your business and how different types of licensing work is necessary to ensure you stay compliant. 

Why Music Is Important to Your Business

Music is incredibly powerful. It can influence the brain and behavior in myriad ways. 

Music may seem like a secondary part of running a business, but the truth is that it can have a real positive impact on sales and other aspects of your business. 

Psychological & Behavioral Impact

Music has a clear psychological and behavioral impact on humans. This isn’t to say people are a monolith or that all music will benefit all types of businesses. 

But by understanding the likely impact of particular choices on those who visit your locations, you can use music to improve their experience and make them more likely to make choices that benefit you, like staying longer in your store or remembering your brand in a positive light.

Why music affects customer psychology is a vast subject with many papers written on the topic, but one noteworthy example is a 2023 study that found music tempo to impact “variety-seeking behavior." Fast tempo music can make customers more likely to seek alternative products to what they might normally purchase. 

Music has the potential to affect dwell time, how much money customers tend to spend, and more. Even if the impact in these areas is only a small percentage or only affects a portion of your visitors, music can have a real tangible impact on many different aspects of your business over time.

Employee Experience & Productivity

Music isn’t just beneficial for improving your sales and driving customer behavior. The right music was also found in a 2022 study to improve employee productivity and satisfaction. This study is nuanced and worth reading further, but it showed, with the support of other related studies, that playing music is a good organizational practice for roles where it won’t be a distraction. 

This is, of course, another big topic, but learning more about it can help you make your team happier and more effective in their jobs. The ideal music for customers may be different than the ideal music for employees, so decisions on what to prioritize will sometimes need to be made, but many locations have zones that are entirely or mostly for employees. 

These zones still benefit from playing music tailored to whatever might boost mood and productivity in their team. 

Brand Identity Through Music

How your brand is perceived can often make or break a business. A strong brand identity can be something customers connect with and may draw them back or, in the best case scenarios, get them to talk about and recommend your business to others. Music is a great tool for building a brand identity.

It’s no secret that the ideal music choice for a location targeting young people, like a pop-culture focused clothing store, will typically be very different than a high-end jewelry store targeting wealthy older adults. These businesses require different brand identities to appeal to their customers. 

The specifics will vary, but in these examples, the clothing store might play punk rock or ska music. The jewelry store might focus on classical music or gentle folk music.

Risks of Ignoring Music or Choosing Poorly

Ignoring music entirely and letting a location simply be silent, or making the wrong choices when playing music, has the potential to seriously impact the customer experience. Silence can make a business feel cold and empty, while the wrong music or playing music very loud can be off-putting and drive customers away.

Consider the earlier example of the jewelry store. Unless it had a highly unusual brand identity and target audience, it would be very strange to hear loud punk rock music playing there. In simple terms, all music has a tone to it — a “feel” that it helps propagate. A business should always try to align the tone of the music it’s playing to how they want visitors to feel about a location and its associated brand.

58%

A 2022 survey from BMI found that “58% [of respondents] would feel negatively impacted if no music was playing” in an eating/drinking establishment.

Types of Businesses That Benefit From Background Music

Music can (and typically should) serve different roles depending on the specific industry a location operates in. The following are some benefits of music for different businesses:

Music Licensing Explained

Music licensing can seem complicated and intimidating. Depending on the specific deals, you may have to contend with performance royalties (payments to a rights holder for playing or performing the song), mechanical royalties (payments for manufacturing and/or distributing recordings), and perhaps other licenses as well.

The process of obtaining licenses to play individual songs is cumbersome. Most businesses will find a service that grants them the right to play many songs at once rather than seeking individual rights to play particular works. 

What Is a Public Performance Right?

One common error people make about music rights is confusing the right to play a work for your personal listening versus playing a song as part of a public performance licensed for a business establishment.

For a business to play a song to their customers, they almost always will need a public performance license. A personal Spotify or YouTube account does not typically grant you such a right for your business, even if you have a paid account on these services. 

A public performance can be thought of as any playing of music (or any work) in which the public will be able to experience it. There are limited exceptions. You may be able to can play music for a small group of friends, for example, without a public performance license. But essentially, all businesses should treat playing music to their customers as a public performance.

If you’re ever unsure what might count as a public professional, consult a legal professional.

Q: Can I use my personal YouTube account to play music in my store?
A: No. Personal consumer services do not cover public performance rights in a business setting.

PROs Explained

PROs are performing rights organizations. These organizations are intermediaries that administer large amounts of public performance rights. Individuals (and companies) can then seek permission from PROs to legally play that music.

The major PROs include BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, and GMR. The specific deals made with these organizations can vary. For example, you may only be able to play some of the songs they hold rights to or only play songs in specific public contexts. It depends on the deal made to secure the ability to play that PRO’s music.

The nuances of music licensing mean that there are exceptions worth understanding if, for any reason, you don’t want to or cannot secure music rights from a PRO. The most obvious is using music in the public domain, which means the music can be used by anyone for more or less any purpose, including to generate profit. But you must be sure that all elements of the music are in the public domain. Many public domain “songs” are still embodied in protected sound recordings.

Smaller facilities can also sometimes play radio broadcasts without securing rights, although this depends on the specifics of your location. Always research the applicable law before doing so.

Legally-Safe Alternatives

Much of the hassle of dealing with large PROs or trying to determine what music you can play without securing music rights can be skipped by using alternatives to the PROs, business-oriented music streaming services. Critically, these services are different from personal music streaming services. 

A business will need to use a commercial music service that has essentially done the hard work for them already. They have secured the rights to play music in public spaces and then allow use of that music to subscribers.

This is what we offer at Pandora CloudCover. You can get started for free to see how easily it works. Terms and conditions apply.

How to Choose the Right Music for Your Brand

Choosing the right music for your brand is about understanding your customers and the identity you want to build for your company in their minds. Larger operations may even want to build multiple interlocking identities depending on the specifics of their locations. 

For example, a section in a store selling instruments may aim for loud, popular music to appeal to a younger demographic. A gardening section in that same store may want a quieter, more serene type of music to appeal to a moderately older demographic.

A simple way of viewing music choice is to ask what sort of music makes sense for your company’s desired identity and will appeal to the core demographic of customers for the products or services being sold. The volume of the music played also matters. Loud music can be overwhelming in some contexts but fun and energetic in others.  

Get Started With Pandora CloudCover

If you want to start playing music in your business, Pandora CloudCover can help you do so legally. You’ll gain access to a huge library of music, able to appeal to any demographic you might want to target. 

Our music is fully licensed, affordable, and brand-focused. We offer a variety of ways to customize what’s playing where in your business. We offer multi-location support, the ability to set zones to play different kinds of music in different spots of the same location, and more, all of which can be made even easier with our set-and-forget CloudBox.

Contact us today to learn more about how Pandora CloudCover can revolutionize how you use music in your business. We’ll help you avoid the pains and pitfalls of navigating music licensing in your business. Reach out today. 

References

‍The Effects of Background Music Tempo on Consumer Variety-Seeking Behavior: The Mediating Role of Arousal. (August 2023). Frontiers in Psychology.

Influencing Consumer Behavior With Music. (May 2024). Psychology Today. 

Role of Music on Psychology of Shoppers in Retail Organizations. (June 2024). ShodhKosh: Journal of Visual and Performing Arts.

“Don’t Stop the Music,” Please: The Relationship between Music Use at Work, Satisfaction, and Performance. (December 2022). Behavioral Sciences.

‍Value of Music Research. (July 2022). BMI.