When it comes to satisfying customer eardrums, WWB works best: Wind, water, and birdsong.Natural sounds can be just as effective as (if not more effective than) traditional options for providing ambient noise.

The End Note

<ul><li>Music on top of noise is just more noise.</li><li>Shoppers tend to spend less time in the store when the music is loud, and more when it is soft.</li><li>There was no statistically significant difference in the amount of money customers spent in each of these scenarios.</li><li>Music volume only affected the amount of time people spent in stores, not sales volume. So if you manage a store with limited floorspace, or run a restaurant with limited seating, the strategic use of loud(er) music might help you better manage your customer flow.</li></ul>

The Ideal Volume

<ul><li>Stores use sights, smells, sounds, and other stimuli in combination to produce particular atmospheres</li><li>In some cases, the place itself is more influential than the product itself in the purchase decision</li><li>For example, to create an upscale atmosphere, a manager might choose classical music, subdued colors, elegant perfumes, cool temperatures, sparsely displayed merchandise, and low lighting</li></ul>

Stores Are Using Music to Make You Spend More

<ul><li>You can fine-tune the background music of a store by paying attention to the modes of the songs you're playing.</li><li>The best tempo/mode combination for boosting sales at a supermarket: Downtempo and minor.</li><li>People buy more when there are slow sad songs playing in the background.</li></ul>

Play Slow And Sad Songs!

Come on feel the noise. Girls rock your boys. We’ll get wild, wild, wild. Wild, wild, wild!

<ul><li>The tempo of a store’s background music can influence both the pace of customer traffic flow and sales volume.</li><li>Fast (uptempo) music makes people move more quickly through a store, and they end up buying less.</li><li>Slow (downtempo), on the other hand, leads to slower shoppers, which in turn leads to shoppers having more time to discover and interact with more products.</li></ul>

The Tempo

<ul><li>Music is not simply a generic sonic mass, but a complex chemistry of controllable elements.</li><li>What works in one store might not work in another.</li><li>The genre of music you play might end up trumping all of the quantifiable characteristics of your store's ambience.</li></ul>

The Music Genre

<ul><li>Retail soundscapes consist of more than just music.</li><li>Stores engage in audio atmospherics which go beyond songs.</li><li>White noise is perhaps the most well-known variety of this non-musical background sound.</li><li>In office settings, the sound of people talking can be heard as well.</li><li>Natural sounds like birdsong and wind can be just as effective as white noise.</li></ul>

White Noise

The self-proclaimed wine connoisseur swaggers into the wine shop, his Italian shoes shuffling across the pristine marble floors. The ceilings are vaulted. The displays are large, immaculately clean…