How to Audit the Sound of Your Own Venue

Most venues have never written down what they sound like. The music is simply there, the way the lighting is there, arriving from a decision nobody remembers making.

That is a problem the moment you want to change anything. You cannot tell whether a new playlist is an improvement if you have no record of the old one. You cannot brief a supplier on a room you have only described as "a bit tired". And you certainly cannot tell whether the fault is the music at all, or the volume, or the fact that four different people set it on four different mornings.

So before the interesting question, which is what the room should sound like, comes the boring one. What does it sound like now?

What this audit is, and what it is not

An audit is descriptive. It records inputs, not outcomes.

This audit	Not this audit
What is playing, from what source, controlled by whom	Whether the music is raising revenue
Volume and pace measured against the actual hour	A taste review of the playlist
Whether the sound agrees with the price point	A designed identity for the room
A page of written findings	A recommendation

That last row matters. The temptation is to fix things as you find them, and you will find things. Resist it for one day. An audit that turns into a redesign halfway through stops being a record of anything.

Designing the identity comes after, and it is a separate exercise. The guide to sonic branding covers that side. This piece is only about establishing where you are starting from.

Before you start

You need one normal trading day, a notebook or a note on your phone, and your own ears.

You do not need a decibel meter. Meters give you a number that is honest and useless: 72 dB means one thing in a hard-surfaced room with twenty people talking and something completely different in an empty carpeted one. The tests below use conversation as the instrument, because conversation is what the volume is actually competing with.

Three of the five checks have to happen at different hours, so plan for a first pass at opening, one at your busiest hour, and one late. Total attention required is roughly 90 minutes. It is not 90 consecutive minutes.

One rule: do the audit as a customer would experience it, standing in the room. Not from behind the bar, not from the office, and not from the app on your phone.

Check 1: What is actually playing, and from where

Write down, in this order:

1. The source. A commercial music service, a consumer streaming account, the radio, a stored playlist on a device, or a member of staff's phone.
2. The account. Whose name is it in? What happens to the music when that person leaves?
3. The device. What plays it, where does it sit, and what happens when it loses connection?
4. The last change. When did the music last change, who changed it, and why?

Question four is the revealing one. If nobody can answer it, you have found your most expensive fault before you have listened to a single track, and you can skip ahead to check 2 knowing what the report will say.

Note the source honestly. A consumer streaming account in a commercial room brings problems that have nothing to do with taste: advertising breaks aimed at a single listener, a recommendation engine that will follow your morning playlist somewhere it does not belong by mid-afternoon, and a public performance licence question you have to answer separately. Whether a given licence is required, and from whom, depends on where you trade. That is a question for your PRO or a local adviser, not for a blog. But note the source now, because it constrains everything downstream.

Check 2: Volume, at three different hours

This is the check that finds real money, and almost nobody runs it properly, because volume is usually set once at whatever hour the person happened to be standing there.

The one metre test. Stand a metre from another person in the busiest part of the room. Hold an ordinary conversation. If either of you raises your voice, leans in, or repeats yourself, the music is too loud for that hour.

Run it three times:

When	What you are looking for
Opening, or your quietest hour	Music too quiet leaves every conversation exposed and the room feeling flat
Your busiest hour	The crowd is now part of the sound. Volume that worked at 9am is usually wrong here
Last hour of trade	Energy is dropping and staff are tired. Often the loudest point of the day, set hours ago and forgotten

Write down the volume setting at each hour, in whatever units your system gives you, even if that is just "notch 4". You are building a record, and a number you can return to is worth more than an adjective.

Volume that is set too high costs you conversation length, and for most venues conversation length and spend are close to the same thing. Volume set too low costs you the room's cover, and every table hears every other table.

Check 3: Pace, against the hour rather than the room

Tempo is the best-evidenced effect in the whole field. Milliman's 1982 supermarket study and his 1986 restaurant study both found that slower music slowed people down: in the restaurant that showed up as a longer stay and a bigger total bill, and in the supermarket as slower traffic through the aisles alongside higher gross sales. The full evidence, and its limits, is set out in the business case for background music.

The practical version is a question you ask three times, once per hour block:

Does the pace of the music match what I need this crowd to do right now?

Then write which way it is wrong, if it is wrong:

• Fast music in a room where you want people to stay and order a second round is costing you the second round.
• Slow music at a lunchtime counter where you need tables to turn is costing you covers.
• The same energy level all day, for three different crowds, is the most common finding of all.

Note that this check has no correct answer in the abstract. It only has an answer relative to your constraint at that hour, which is either turnover or average ticket. Write down which one you are optimising for at each hour before you judge the music. If you cannot name it, that is a finding in itself, and a more important one than the tempo.

Check 4: Fit, against the price point

The congruence research is consistent and slightly uncomfortable. In a wine store, classical music did not sell more bottles, it sold more expensive ones. In a supermarket wine aisle, French music sold French wine and German music sold German, and when customers were asked afterwards, their answers indicated they had not noticed the music affecting their choice.

None of that means "play classical music". It means the room is telling customers what to expect before they read a price, and it is doing that whether you designed it or not.

Stand in the room and ask four questions:

1. If a stranger walked in and heard only the music, what would they guess your prices were?
2. Is that guess higher or lower than your actual prices?
3. Does the music agree with the rest of the room, the lighting, the materials, the menu?
4. Would this music make sense in a competitor's venue that sits a tier above or below you?

Question two is the one to write down. Music that sounds cheaper than your prices makes the prices feel high. Music that sounds more precious than your prices makes a casual room feel unwelcoming. Both are congruence failures and both cost, in opposite directions.

Check 5: Continuity

The last check is about what happens over hours and days rather than in a moment.

Repetition. Note any track you hear twice in a shift. Your customers will not notice. Your staff will, because they hear the whole playlist for a whole shift, every shift they work, and they are the reason most venues lose control of the sound: someone gets tired of it and changes it. Repetition is not a taste problem, it is a staffing problem that becomes a governance problem.

Gaps. Note any moment the music stops. A dropped connection, a playlist that reached the end, a device that failed to sync overnight. Unplanned silence breaks a room faster than bad music does, and it almost never gets reported, because the person who notices is a customer and customers do not file tickets.

Variation across days. Ask the question you cannot answer in one shift: does a customer who visits on Tuesday and again on Saturday hear a room with the same character? Consistency is what turns atmosphere into recognition. A venue that sounds different every visit has no sonic identity, however good any single playlist is.

The score sheet

One page. Fill it in as you go and keep it, because the value of an audit is mostly in running it again in six months.

Check	What you record	Fault if
1. Source and control	Source, account holder, device, last change and by whom	Nobody can name who may change the music
2. Volume	Setting at three hours, plus one metre test result at each	The test fails at any hour, especially the busiest
3. Pace	Your constraint at each hour, and whether tempo serves it	One energy level running across different crowds
4. Fit	The price a stranger would guess from the music alone	That guess sits a tier away from your actual prices
5. Continuity	Repeats heard, silences observed, variation across days	Any unplanned silence, or a room with no consistent character

Five checks, and a venue in reasonable shape usually fails two of them. Failing three or four is common and is not an emergency. It is what happens when a decision gets made once during fit-out and then never revisited.

What to do with the result

Order the faults by what they cost to fix, not by how interesting they are.

1. Ownership first, if check 1 failed. One line, written down: who chooses, who may change it, what is never played. Everything else you fix will drift back within a month without this, so it is genuinely first and not merely important.
2. Volume second, if check 2 failed. It is free, it takes a shift, and it is the fault most directly connected to how long people stay.
3. Pace third, if check 3 failed. Usually this means splitting one all-day setting into two or three, which is a scheduling change rather than a music change.
4. Source fourth, if check 1 turned up a consumer account or a member of staff's phone. This one costs money, which is why it sits below the three that do not.
5. Fit and identity last. It is the most interesting question on the list and the least urgent. A coherent identity played too loud, through one broken speaker, at the wrong pace, still sounds like nothing.

Run it again

The single most useful property of an audit is that it is repeatable. Six months from now, the same five checks on the same page will tell you something a one-off assessment never can: whether the fixes held, or whether the room quietly drifted back to whoever opened that morning.

Most of them drift. That is not a failure of the audit. It is what an audit is for.