Posted by Rachel Schwartz on 6/26/2020 to
Restaurant
Know your brand. This will influence the type of music you gravitate towards, so it's important to have a solid understanding of your restaurant, your brand, and your intended audience.
Invest in a good audio system. You could come up with the best playlist in the world, but it won't matter if you have a bad, old, or faulty sound system. Investing in a quality system can make a huge difference.
Pay attention to the floor and adjust the volume accordingly. Be sure to be able to adjust the volume of the music to how busy your restaurant is. The more crowded it gets, start inching the volume up and then ease it back down as the rush starts to disperse. Ideally, the music should be low enough that your customers can comfortably converse with each other at their table but loud enough that they can't easily overhear conversations from surrounding tables.
Avoid Top 40 Hits and radio favorites. Your customers most likely hear what's in current rotation on the radio several times a day as it is, they don't need to hear it while trying to eat in your restaurant too. Try to choose older or lesser known songs. Aim to create a playlist long enough that neither your customers nor your staff will get bored or annoyed by hearing the same songs too often.
Have more than one playlist to choose from. Moods change throughout the day and so does the atmosphere in a restaurant. Create multiple playlists that each have different levels of energy or intensity. A playlist that fits a quiet morning should not still be playing during the high energy lunch rush a few hours later. You can also switch up genres, artists, and tempos of songs with multiple playlists.
