Background music is one of the few in-store design choices with a directly measured effect on revenue. In a study published in the Journal of Marketing, researcher Ronald Milliman tracked nine weeks of real supermarket sales and found that switching the in-store soundtrack from a fast tempo to a slow one raised average daily sales by 38%, with nothing else about the store changed.
Tempo controls pace, and pace controls spend
The mechanism is physical before it's psychological: slower music makes people walk slower. In Milliman's supermarket study, shoppers exposed to slow-tempo music moved through the aisles at a more relaxed pace, spent more time in the store, and were exposed to more of the shelf — which showed up directly in the register totals.
A follow-up study by the same researcher, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found the same lever works in restaurants but cuts a different way: diners who heard slow-tempo music lingered at the table for longer and spent more on drinks, while diners who heard fast-tempo music finished faster, turning tables over more quickly but spending less per visit. Tempo doesn't just add or subtract sales — it decides whether a venue is optimizing for spend-per-visit or covers-per-hour.
Music can change what people buy, not just how much
A frequently cited study published in Nature by North, Hargreaves and McKendrick placed French accordion music and German brass-band music on alternating days next to a supermarket wine display stocked with both French and German bottles. On days with French music, French wine outsold German wine by roughly three to one; on days with German music, the ratio flipped. When shoppers were asked afterwards whether the music had influenced their choice, only a small minority said yes.
That gap — a measurable effect on behavior with almost no conscious awareness of it — is the central reason background music can't be treated as an afterthought. If sound shapes decisions below awareness, leaving it to a random consumer streaming playlist means a venue is influencing its own customers by accident instead of by design.
Dwell time is the multiplier
Retail footfall analytics firms that track how long shoppers stay in a store consistently report that small increases in dwell time convert into proportionally larger increases in sales, because more time in-store means more browsing, more product exposure and more opportunities to convert. Music engineered to be pleasant rather than intrusive is one of the more direct ways to extend that time without changing layout or headcount.
Marketing professor Philip Kotler named this whole category of design decisions "atmospherics" as far back as 1973, arguing that sound, lighting, scent and layout are all marketing tools a retailer can consciously design rather than side effects to ignore. Sound was one of his four original channels — and, of the four, one of the cheapest to change and the easiest to get wrong by default.
The throughline across four decades of retail-atmospherics research is consistent: sound is not background at all — it's a lever, on par with lighting or layout. Milliman's original supermarket study remains the headline number: the right tempo, deliberately chosen, moved sales by 38%. Left to a generic streaming playlist or no music at all, that same lever works against a venue instead of for it.
Sources
- Milliman, R. E. (1982). "Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket Shoppers." Journal of Marketing, 46(3), 86–91.
- Milliman, R. E. (1986). "The Influence of Background Music on the Behavior of Restaurant Patrons." Journal of Consumer Research, 13(2), 286–289.
- North, A. C., Hargreaves, D. J., & McKendrick, J. (1997). "In-store music affects product choice." Nature, 390, 132.
- Kotler, P. (1973). "Atmospherics as a Marketing Tool." Journal of Retailing, 49(4), 48–64.