The role of music in creating the right atmosphere for a restaurant or café
Can you imagine the world without music? Well, we neither. Music plays everywhere: in people’s homes, on the street, in restaurants and cafes, and generally in every pair of headphones. But have you ever thought about why in certain places a certain type of music is played?
Clever restaurant management teams ! For example, in a shopping mall, music forms a sound barrier that separates people from background noise and creates the right atmosphere. Fast food restaurants need people to eat fast and go so they choose energetic music. Restaurants and cafes need just the opposite. For them it’s important that guests can relax, stay longer, and order several times.
Your restaurant’s background music can be a small detail adding to the vibe of your location or the heart of the whole concept. One of our restaurant management tips for your team would be: remember that background music matters so don’t treat it as an afterthought.
How customer behavior is affected by the choice of restaurant music?
How to choose the right background music for restaurants? First of all, keep in mind that background music, just like interior design, affects people’s moods: it makes you think, be sad, happy or dreamy, relaxed or eager to dance. There is an endless variety of musical genres and each of them has an individual effect. Depending on how you want to influence your visitors, each restaurant type needs a personal playlist.
Restaurant background music tactics?
Music can either attract guests to your restaurant or make them want to leave as fast as possible. There are many reasons for the latter, for example, when it’s too loud indoors, or you play a genre that doesn’t match the restaurant concept or the broadcast music has a horrible sound quality. To help you avoid these mistakes, we decided to categorize background music according to the different restaurant types. The right combination of decoration, cuisine, and music will achieve the desired result by creating the right atmosphere and mood for your guests.
Background music for a coffee shop?
If you open a coffee shop, you should know that a coffeehouse is a good place for meetings, dates, chilling time after walking around the city, or for a quick stop to grab a coffee to go. A place with the right atmosphere, cute coffee shop name, a small cozy space, a stylish interior, polite and unobtrusive staff won’t be complete without good music. The main thing is that restaurant music should not be annoying: the guest shouldn’t need to think about the music too much or be distracted by it. And silence doesn’t fit either.
Usually, light genres of electronic music (acid jazz, deep house) suit coffee shops best. Despite the fact that these genres were created for dancing, they are unobtrusive. So don’t worry, most likely your visitors won’t start dancing with coffee in their hands (which can be fun, by the way). On the other hand, people won’t fall asleep! You can mix different genres, for example, minimal and jazz house or trip hop and downtempo are a good fit for the evenings.
Many coffee houses and restaurant owners, in general, consider an ambient genre as the best background music. In reality, though, these tracks are usually saturated with smooth harmonic transitions, sounds of nature, and blurry vocals. For some this may be the perfect background but, there again, the purpose of a coffee house is not to put guests to sleep, but to maintain a cheerful mood.
Don’t play recent dance trends, such as a progressive house, electro house, techno, and French house. They are more dynamic, and modern music genres won’t let your guests relax, especially if they have dropped in for only a short while. This is especially true in the evening, when most of your guests have already had a busy day and all they want is to relax a bit and talk with colleagues or friends. Despite all the changes, and rethinking the concept of the coffee house, it is still associated with relaxing, so don’t spoil this correlation.
Choosing the right background music will always help you to create the right atmosphere, while experiments can scare off potential guests and leave only a limited target audience. Of course, if you have any particular concept that is related to the style of a given music genre, then do it! But these are special cases, where everything, starting with the staff uniform and ending with the music, is done according to an existing concept.
Background music for a restaurant
Perhaps the hardest choice of background music comes up when you own a restaurant. The playlist for restaurants is a bit similar to cafes and coffee shops, but with the emphasis on live instruments, instead of electronics. Soft jazz and classical music are perfect choices.
At the same time, at weekends luxury restaurants may provide guests with live classical recitals. As a rule, these will be duets for piano and violin. Winds are a great fit too! Don’t mix jazz and classical together. It is necessary to have a short break between two playlists, or a smooth and quiet transition.
A high-end restaurant is a place where people go to spend money and receive high-level service. No one comes just for a coffee or a 20-minute wait until the rain stops. There is always a special occasion when people visit a luxury restaurant: a date, business meeting, celebration, anniversary, etc. Therefore, the restaurant background music should be appropriate.
Background music for a cafe
The most successful music genres for cafes are lounge, deep house, bossa nova, nu jazz, etc. Very often cafe owners, managers or whoever is responsible for the music background, play the mainstream trends currently in the top charts. This is not actually the best idea. There is nothing wrong with this music but it is too distracting. Even worse, is when the art director or owner relies on his own taste and adds blues, R’n’B, funk and other incompatible styles to a playlist with pop songs. As a result, you’ll get a weird mixture of everything, instead of a nice and appropriate cafe playlist. Make your choice of music for cafe as scrupulously as you choose a cafe POS.
Background music for a fast food restaurant
Finally, here we are, in the one place where all the best pop songs should be. Coming to a fast food place, all that people want is to grab something to eat and leave. There isn’t the time to relax with a cup of coffee while waiting for risotto with oysters.
Music should affect a person’s mood positively, so don’t go for sad, slow songs. The music background for fast food should aim to create an atmosphere of “eat and go”. The popular music styles here are: R’n’B, hip-hop, progressive house, electro house, pop, dance, electronic. Basically, any hip-hop and dance song will fit (except dubstep, breakbeat, or trap).
Music for restaurant staff
With this, it is better to build on what your employees like and what they prefer to listen to as background music while working. The main thing is that the music shouldn’t distract them and that they fulfill their duties. Perhaps your team prefers to work in complete silence, fully getting into the work process. Anyway, for the staff, you don’t need to stick to the royalty rule for commercial use of music: staff areas are not considered public places, so there is no need to be concerned when listening to records, radio, iTunes, Google Play Music, Spotify, or other music streamers online.
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