Background Music (BGM) is heard in many places we visit, restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels, shopping centres, gyms, supermarkets and it’s fair to say that the quality varies quite considerably, and many people find it quite annoying.
So how do you make sure the BGM in your venue is good and not going to upset your customers or staff?
The first thing to bear in mind is that you can’t please “all of the people, all of the time” but at the same time, as a business, you don’t want to upset your target market.
So, as I advised in a previous article it’s important to create a good music brief for your venue which considers things like – your brand, your customers, the purpose of the music, the atmosphere you want to create and what your customers will be doing whilst the BGM is playing.
It’s also important to have a good sound system and a properly licensed BGM player. It’s essential that your player is approved by PPL/PRS and is licenced for public use. Please note that Spotify and similar platforms are not licenced for public entertainment but only private use.
Once you have thought about the above you can then start thinking about the actual music and would recommend starting with around 1000-2000 tracks in the BGM collection and updating this every month.
If you don’t do this then you will find that managers and staff will complain about hearing the same music all the time.
So how do you go about choosing 1000 tracks for your music collection?
The easiest, and probably best, way is to ask the BGM player supplier to do it for you and most of them offer this service as part of the purchase or rental of their equipment. They will be experienced in helping venues decide on a simple “standard collection” or choosing a more bespoke and venue unique collection which may suit brands that want to stand out.
However, if you are feeling creative and want to create your own music collection then I suggest you create a Playlist for each “day part” of your business. Here’s a step-by-step guide –
- Identify the key day parts of your business, with times
- Work out the total hours per day part per week
- Identify the busiest day parts
- Allocate the number of tracks needed for each day part based on hours and business levels, see below
- Morning (10am – Midday) 14 hours/week 200 tracks
- Lunch (Midday – 5pm) 25 hours/week 300 tracks
- Evening (5pm to 11pm) 30 hours/week 300 tracks
- Weekend Lunch (Fri/Sat Midday – 5pm) 10 hours/week 100 tracks
- Weekend Evening (Fri/Sat 5pm – Midnight) 14 hours/week 100 tracks
- Next, decide which genres, decades and tempo you would like for each playlist
- Here’s an example for Morning
- Soul/Pop/RnB – 1980s, 1990s, 2000s – laidback tempo
- Based on the above, pick nine tracks as “guide” tracks
- Sade – Smooth Operator
- Go West – What You Won’t Do For love
- New Edition – Mr. Telephone Man
- The Chimes – I Still Haven’t Found
- Rae & Christian – All I Ask
- Martine Girault – Revival
- Ashanti – Foolish
- Angie Stone – Wish I Didn’t Miss You
- Joss Stone – Fell in Love with a Boy
- Now find another 191 tracks that can play alongside the “guide” tracks
- Now repeat the process for all day parts
- Good luck!
Hopefully the above will help you choose background music for your venue and if you would like to discuss further then please get in touch and “Let’s Talk About Music”.