Restaurant Music – Top Tips

Here we’ve compiled some great articles and reference points for getting music right in your restaurant, restaurant chain or business.

Everything you need to know about restaurant music

This is a great article from Dana Krook at Touch Bistro, which covers everything to help you understand how to have great music in your restaurant.

As a specialist music provider for business, including restaurant chains, we particularly like the advice this article contains, when making decisions about your music for businesses;

  • Adjust speed and tempo
  • Adjust volume
  • Keep your music choices on brand
  • Adjust for the time of day (day parting)
  • Adjust for the levels of customers

A couple of other business critical options and salient points well made are;

  • Keep your playlists fresh – a benefit of streamed music
  • Stay Legal (see our article on Staying Legal)

Dana also highlights the importance of choosing the right components for sound systems in restaurants, and rightly so, as our experience suggests this is often an area businesses can fall down.

We recall visiting a very high-end fashion store overseas, where we’re pretty sure the manager’s choice of sound system i.e. a small, handheld radio screeching out distorted music (and local adverts) at ridiculously high levels, did not reflect the brand owner’s multi-billion dollar image they’d created over many years.

So yes, not only is it important to be playing the right music choices, at the right time of day, at the right levels for your customers, it is also important that it sounds really good too, otherwise your customers will leave before they get to order deserts and coffee!

How to choose the right background music for restaurants

In this article Kate Palanchuck of Poster POS, talks very clearly about making the right music choices for the right venue i.e. coffee shops vs bars vs restaurants vs fast food chains and highlights that music choices should be very different for each venue.

We also like that Kate mentions in her article the importance of giving consideration to staff and the distinction between music playing in public facing areas vs staff areas.

In our experience motivation of staff by music can be overlooked by restaurant owners/operators and is an area we’re really keen to highlight whenever we discuss music for any business.

With an increase in awareness of mental wellbeing for staff too, music can play an important role in keeping people motivated and happy whilst at work for 8, 10 or 12-hours a day.

With well designed, zonal sound systems it is possible to have solutions installed that cater for licenced, streamed playlists in public facing areas and staff areas in restaurants, each with their own tempo, volume, and energy.

Top 10 Restaurant trends

This article from Andrew Seymour at Food Service Equipment Journal caught our eye for lots of reasons. Some of the restaurant trends highlighted excite us, after all who doesn’t love a great food experience, but it seems we also like a restaurant to have a great atmosphere or ambience.

Deliveroo research shows that 88% of Brits find elements such as ambience and service just as important as the food when it comes to having a good experience in a restaurant.

As we know music is a key factor in creating ambience and atmosphere, it can also affect how we behave and how our food tastes. See our article Anti-Social Behaviour Reduces with Classical Music for further information.

Andrew mentions that once more Instagram #foodporn is on trend after falling out of favour a little in 2017-18 as we all became a little bored of seeing people’s food and dinner shots.

Perfect-Octave-Burger-Bar-Image-Insta

We must admit we are suckers for a great burger shot, or sushi, or doughnuts.

But it set us to thinking….with more and more restaurants using streamed music services, when customers have had a great experience, are they sharing music playlists from that restaurant too? And if they are not, will they be in the future?

With a number of streamed music providers, including ours, this is possible….

#foodforthought #musicforbusiness #musicforrestaurants

Main Photo by Youjeen Cho 

Get in Touch:

Submit this form or visit our Music for Hospitality page to find out more.