Music for a restaurant or cafe without extra royalties - how to organise it

In a restaurant or a cafe, music rarely has a single owner. It is switched on by whoever arrives for the shift first, changed by whoever happens not to like it, and answered for by the owner of the venue regardless. This article is about the organisational side: how to settle it once so that the subject stops coming back.

You will not find advice here on which genre suits lunchtime and which suits dinner. We covered that separately. What matters here is something simpler and less obvious: who decides, what the music is playing from, and what happens when the internet drops or when a new person joins the floor team.

Getting this in order takes a single afternoon. The effect is that for the next year nobody has to think about it.

Who in the venue answers for what plays

Formally the venue answers for it, meaning the person or company running it. In practice the decision is made by whoever holds the remote or the cable. Most of the trouble arises exactly where those two sentences meet.

In a small cafe the barista switches the system on. In a restaurant it is the floor manager or whoever happens to be opening up. In accommodation it sometimes turns out that reception and the breakfast room run from two different sources and nobody has ever compared what comes out of them. Nobody here is acting in bad faith. It simply was never settled.

So the first step is a dull but necessary one: name one person who is responsible for it, and write down what the venue is playing from. Only after that does a conversation about repertoire make any sense.

A member of staff's private account, the commonest source of confusion

This happens in every other venue, and always for the same reason: it was the quickest thing to do. Somebody plugged in their own phone because the player was not working that day, and it stayed that way for two years.

Three things follow from that:

• The set leaves with the person - the employee moves on, the playlist moves on with them, and the venue starts from nothing.
• Nobody knows what is actually in there - after a few months the content is the product of somebody else's taste and of pure chance.
• The service is a private one - a standard streaming account is designed for a private user, not for playing music where guests are listening.

What to do about it

The answer is not to forbid staff anything. The answer is for the venue to have its own permanent source of sound, one that nobody has to bring in from home. The venue's equipment, the venue's carrier, the venue's set. A change of shift then no longer changes what is heard at the tables, and a new member of staff does not need an idea of their own on the subject.

A carrier that simply sits by the equipment

Here comes something easy to overlook while planning: the carrier matters.

A disc or a memory stick lying next to the player always works. It needs no login, no signal, it suggests nothing of its own accord and it does not interrupt in the middle of serving a guest. When the internet goes down, and it usually goes down on a Friday evening, the music carries on, because none of that concerns it.

There is also a small detail that in hospitality matters more than you would think: the carrier is visible. A disc with a cover in the colours of the venue, standing by the equipment, is at the same time an answer to the question of what you are playing, and guests ask that more often than you might expect. On CD discs we release a repertoire created by people from outside collective management organisations, registered with none of them, to which we hold full rights, with printing on the disc itself. If the venue has no disc player, the same content goes onto a branded memory stick.

Time of day blocks are a matter of the rota, not of taste

A restaurant changes several times between breakfast and closing. The morning is quiet and bright, lunchtime is busy and fast, the evening is slower and darker. That different parts of the day call for a different sound we wrote about in our piece on the repertoire from breakfast to evening.

What interests us here is the other side of the same matter: blocks are above all an organisational tool. If the set is divided into three parts, the instruction for the staff is short: the first one in the morning, the second in the afternoon, the third in the evening. Anyone can carry that out without hesitating and without ideas of their own.

A single set for the whole day has the drawback of naturally inviting interference. Somebody decides that in the evening it no longer fits, reaches for a phone, and all the earlier work goes to waste.

The garden, the terrace and what carries outside

Seasonally this is the most frequently overlooked part of a venue. A speaker on the wall of the building or under a parasol plays for guests sitting outside, so it is still a public performance. The place counts in exactly the same way as it does indoors.

Two purely practical things are worth remembering as well. Outside it is noisier, so the same volume setting as in the dining room will be inaudible. On the other hand the sound carries to neighbours whose opinion nobody asked for. A separate, quieter and calmer setting for the garden usually solves both problems at once.

What to hand over to the next shift

The last element, without which everything else falls apart within a quarter. A short set of instructions by the equipment, five points:

1. What we play from - a specific device and a specific carrier.
2. Which set at which time - with no room for interpretation.
3. What volume indoors and what outside - ideally marked directly on the dial.
4. What we do not plug in - private phones and private accounts.
5. Who to call when something stops working - one name, not a vague "somebody in the office".

That sheet of paper matters more than all the earlier decisions put together, because it is what makes the arrangement survive staff turnover. It hangs where the equipment stands, and it has to be legible to somebody who is on their second day at work.

Music in hospitality does not need a grand project. It needs one decision, one carrier and one sheet of paper by the player. The rest, meaning what actually plays and how it sounds at eleven in the morning, is the more enjoyable part of the job - you will find pointers in our post on choosing background music for a cafe and a restaurant. Everything we prepare for venues is gathered in the HoReCa section.