Music analytics: How to measure the impact of sound on your dwell time

Music gets talked about in feelings. But it behaves like a lever. Pull the right one and customers stay longer, spend more and come back. What's critical is how you find that lever and measure what it's worth.

This is especially true of the hospitality industry, where a carefully curated soundtrack can set the ambiance for a delicious Mexican meal or double down on a café's coziness in fall. In this article, we'll explore the psychology behind music branding and the tech stack that improves customer dwell time.

What is music priming?

Music can prime us to think, feel and do — activating unconscious feelings and biases that influence how customers interpret products or environments. In restaurant psychology, this is otherwise known as music priming. To explain this in a commercial context, it's worth turning to a classic field experiment in consumer and music psychology conducted by Adrian North, David Hargreaves and Jennifer McKendrick at the turn of the millennium.

Photo: Chuko Cribb / Unsplash

The study, which lasted for two weeks in a British supermarket and appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology, investigated whether stereotypically French or German background music affected shoppers' choices between French and German wines. The results were conclusive: on the days when French music (complete with accordions) was played, French wines outsold German wines; when German music (think tubas and beer halls) was played, German wines outsold French wines.

Around 50% of the shoppers observed took part in a survey afterward, and most confirmed that the music made them think of France and Germany, respectively. Despite this, only a tiny fraction of shoppers (six out of 44) believed the music influenced their selection, and only one shopper admitted to the music being a primary reason for choosing a particular type of wine.

The paper concluded "that retailers may use musical fit to influence consumers' in-store product choices shows the considerable potential of models con­cerning prototypicality-neural networks in attempting to explain the effects of music on consumer behavior." In other words, music didn't persuade shoppers to buy. It reduced the friction of deciding.

Dwell time economics: Turning minutes into margin

Sound is one of our most powerful senses, and brands large and small are investing heavily to make their presence felt. If music has the ability to prime us (consciously or otherwise), how does that manifest itself in retail spaces and restaurants?

A quick stop by that trendy clothes shop you like turns into a 45-minute social gathering and impulse buy. The record shop? They're masters at getting us to hang around, playing just the right tune to lock us in for an hour. And there's the other end of the scale; the high-energy dance music played to the max for the juice shop pickup makes a 10-minute wait feel like two as the thudding bpm pushes us in, and perhaps not so quickly out of the store.

What is the meaning of dwell time? The term has gained popularity in digital marketing, mainly on websites and social media, but it's just as relevant in a bricks-and-mortar context. How much, or how little, customer dwell time is spent in retail spaces impacts seasonal marketing, operations spend and ultimately have a direct correlation on a businesses's bottom line.

For example, Soundtrack commissioned a study "analyzing 1.8m purchases from a well-known fast food restaurant chain, sales jumped 9.1% when customers heard a mix of hits and lesser-known songs chosen to fit the brand, compared to playlists that contained only random hits." More interestingly, the brand-aligned music created customer stickiness with a 15.6% increase in desert purchases when the playlist fit the brand, again, a mixture of both popular and obscure songs.

Interior design, lighting, and packaging all help bring a fast food chain brand to life, but in a commercial space scientific evidence points to sound as the stimuli to reach the brain the fastest.

Data courtesy of Science Direct.

Stacking up: How to measure dwell time and improve it

Many restaurants track table time. The smarter ones track how that time is spent and its relationship to customer spend (and, ultimately, how to increase restaurant sales). And the question most restaurateurs arrive at eventually is a practical one: how do I actually measure this? The answer involves three categories of tools, used in sequence.

A typical stack starts with presence and movement tracking. Tools like Cisco Meraki or Purple use guest Wi-Fi to estimate visit duration and repeat behaviour, while camera-based systems like RetailNext or V-Count provide more precise dwell time, queue length and zone-level insights.

That data only becomes useful when paired with POS systems like Toast POS or Lightspeed, linking time spent to revenue per table. From there, break dwell time into stages (wait, order, dine, linger) and test variables.

Music is one of the few levers you can adjust instantly. If slower playlists increase average table time but also lift spend per customer, you've found margin. If they have slow turnover at peak hours, adjust tempo by daypart to boost restaurant turnover. That's where Soundtrack comes in, with a library of more than 125 million fully licensed songs, 2,500 playlists and the Soundtrack AI Playlist Creator, where you can create and schedule playlists tailored to your business needs through simple prompts.

The goal isn't longer dwell time. It's measurable, profitable dwell time — tracked, tested and tuned like any other performance channel. Whether it's choosing wine, forgetting time in a record shop or going for a quick bite to eat; in a world of infinite distraction, the right song doesn't just set the mood. It sets the margin.

Try Soundtrack free for 14 days to get started.