Often dismissed as annoying, or at best worthless, background music could become more interesting for hospitality companies as streaming music services begin to offer business products. By Andrew Hennigan

Just like vinyl was replaced by CDs, downloadable music is quickly being replaced by streaming music services like Spotify, Deezer, Google Play Music and, since June, the new Apple Music. It’s not hard to see why these services are so popular with consumers. They give instant access to any song in their catalogue, without taking up storage space on your mobile device. Plus they allow people to create and share playlists for every occasion.

But for businesses there hasn’t been a legal way to use these services in cafes, restaurants, hotels, resorts and many other places background music is normally used. Now a startup in Sweden called Soundtrack Your Brand has rolled out a legal-for-business streaming music service in cooperation with Spotify.

Music is good for business, according to Soundtrack your Brand CEO Ola Sars, and associating your brand with the right kind of music makes customers stay longer, boosts revenues and increases staff satisfaction. What makes it simpler to achieve that goal with streaming music is the way it can be managed more easily.

Soundtrack your Brand provides a special app that lets customers create playlists and schedule a music calendar for the week ahead, where different playlists are used at different times on different days. The same playlists can also be available to customers through their normal Spotify accounts. This can be used to help build the musical brand and to support marketing campaigns, sharing lists through social media and QR coded promotional materials.

One of the earliest adopters of the new streaming service is the Story Hotel in downtown Stockholm. A music-themed boutique hotel, the Story has regular live music and DJs so managing the background music is important for the brand. The hotel’s creative manager Chris Thompson creates the playlists himself and is careful to make sure that the music appeals to a broad range of customers – and isn’t too loud.  

“I’m a strong believer in the right levels of volume,” says Thompson. “I want you to be able to have a conversation. This place is a social space, not a nightclub”.

Spotify Business allows a single user account to be used in up to five locations, which is suitable for small and medium-size businesses. For larger chains there is a version called Spotify Enterprise that can handle more locations, allowing the music in all locations to be scheduled from a central control panel, simplifying management and ensuring that the sound of all locations stays on brand. The first customer to sign up for Spotify Enterprise is McDonalds Sweden.

New marketing opportunities

McDonalds has chosen to use streaming music partly because they are sure that good music will make customers happy and also because they believe that it creates a better working environment for staff. Poorly chosen music might annoy customers for a few minutes but poor employees have to put up with the same music for hours at a time and don’t have the option to just go elsewhere. The company also anticipates new marketing opportunities, connecting the music with promotions and events.

Businesses that have music expertise in house, like the Story Hotel, are likely to create their own playlists but others like McDonalds call on professional DJs to craft the perfect playlist for the target demographic.  At the Story Hotel the breakfast playlist contains about 350 songs and the lunch evening lists has about 700 songs. Building a playlist can be quite difficult and takes a lot of work, according to Thompson.

By separating the creation from the daily operation this means that the DJ only needs to be involved at the playlist development stage, essentially leaving the day-to-day running on autopilot. Hopefully this will mean that consumers will be treated to background music chosen by experts and less dependent on the whim of untrained staff.

At the moment Spotify is the only streaming music service with a business options, but this is likely to change as soon as the consumer market starts to saturate. Rivals like Apple Music focus first on the larger and legally less complicated consumer markets first, but not for long. The days of the battered old CD player in the hotel office are already numbered.