Three sources of music in a venue have three different characters and three different weak points. None of them is better in absolute terms - each works somewhere else. Below we take them apart, without pretending the choice is obvious.
A conversation about music in a venue usually starts with the question of what to play, when it should start with where we are going to get it from. It is the source that settles the things which turn out to be the most irritating later on: whether the music will play without the internet, whether an advert will break in halfway through the day, and whether somebody has to attend to it every morning.
First, one thing all three options share. Music played where clients can hear it counts as public playback, whether it comes from a radio, an app or a disc. What matters is the place, not the device.
- The radio takes no work, but it lets adverts and content you have no control over into your venue.
- Streaming offers an enormous choice, yet a service for private users usually does not cover playback in a public place.
- Streaming goes quiet along with the internet, and a connection usually drops at the worst possible moment.
- Your own carrier plays what you chose, every day and unattended, but it has to be prepared once.
- Public playback is decided by the place, not by the device the sound comes out of.
The radio: least work, least control
The radio has an advantage that is hard to overrate in a place where everybody's hands are full: you switch it on once and it works. Nobody compiles, updates or supervises anything. The presenters, the weather and the traffic reports also give the impression that something is going on. In a workshop, a bakery or a small daytime bar that can be an asset.
The drawbacks follow from exactly the same feature: you have no say in what comes next.
- Adverts - including adverts for your competitors, played to your clients in your venue.
- News bulletins - the news halfway through dinner can change the mood of a room in a matter of seconds.
- A random repertoire - after two quiet tracks something may come in that does not suit the place at all.
- Repetition despite appearances - format stations play a narrow rotation, so the staff end up hearing the same thing over and over anyway.
Formally the radio changes nothing: playback in a venue remains public playback, because what counts is the place, not the source of the signal.
Streaming: the widest choice and the greatest dependence
Streaming services won on convenience. The choice is practically unlimited, ready-made sets for every part of the day are at hand, and the whole thing is controlled from a phone behind the bar.
Three things are worth knowing, though, and they are talked about less often.
- The scope of the service - an account for a private user usually does not cover playback in a public place. That is a matter of the terms of the service itself, and they are worth reading before an app becomes the permanent source of music in a venue.
- Dependence on the connection - when the internet goes down the music goes quiet with it, and rather on a Friday evening than on a Tuesday morning.
- Playlist drift - the algorithm adds its own recommendations, and after a few weeks the venue is playing something nobody consciously chose.
Streaming does have one advantage that cannot be imitated: it lets you test a direction quickly. Before you decide what should play at your place permanently, you can spend a week listening to different moods and see what suits the room. On choosing the music itself we wrote in our piece on background music for a cafe, a hotel and a restaurant.
Your own carrier: the fewest surprises
A disc or a memory stick lying next to the equipment is the least spectacular and the most predictable solution. It plays exactly what you chose, at the same quality, every day - including when there is no internet, when an employee has come in without a phone, and when the shift is being run by somebody doing it for the first time.
It does have to be prepared once, though: you have to settle what should play, how much of it there should be and where it comes from. It is the only one of the three options that calls for a decision at the start, and the only one that asks nothing of you afterwards.
A disc or a memory stick
The choice depends entirely on the equipment you already have. If there is a player or a hi-fi in the venue, the natural carrier is a CD disc; it can be printed with the name of the venue and the number of the set, which is what printing on CD discs is for. If the equipment only has a USB socket, a memory stick will be handier, and easier to tuck away behind the counter.
When each choice makes sense
- The radio - when music really is a secondary matter and the place is an everyday, busy one: a workshop, a service point, a small daytime bar.
- Streaming - when you are still looking for a direction and checking what suits the room. For permanent playback you have to come back to the question of the scope of the service.
- Your own carrier - when music plays every day for many hours, has to be predictable and has to manage without supervision.
In practice a mixed arrangement usually wins: a carrier as the basis of the day and something extra for special occasions. If you want to break the day into parts, have a look at our piece on music in a restaurant from breakfast to the evening.
What to check before deciding
- Look at the equipment - a disc drive, a USB socket, a line input, the loudspeakers, and whether the zones can be controlled separately.
- Count the hours - how long the venue really plays music during a day, and how many times a set turns over in that time.
- Decide who is responsible - one role, not the private phone of whoever is on shift.
- Read the terms of what you are using - especially the part about playback outside private use.
- Write down where the music comes from - so that a year later nobody has to reconstruct it from memory.
Check one thing on your equipment: whether it resumes playback by itself after a power cut, or has to be started by hand. It is a detail, but in practice it decides whether the music has to be remembered every single morning, or never.
The material itself is a separate question
Whatever the carrier, the question of what is actually playing remains. Our repertoire is made up of recordings by creators who do not belong to collective management organisations and have not registered their works with them. The rights to use those recordings are held in full on our side, and that is where this repertoire being free of fees payable to those organisations comes from.
These are not random files off the internet of unknown origin, but specific recordings by specific people. It is worth noting down where the music in your venue comes from and what it allows - a single sheet among your papers is enough. If you want to work out how that looks in your case, write to us through the contact form.
There is no single right answer here, only a conscious choice. The radio buys peace of mind at the cost of control, streaming buys choice at the cost of dependence, and your own carrier buys predictability at the cost of one afternoon of work at the start. The worst option is the fourth one, and the most common in practice: inheriting a solution from the previous shift and never giving it a thought.
