For a retail store, it’s all about providing the right shopping experience for your customers. Everything outside your store is meant to draw customers in, and everything inside is designed to encourage your customers to stay longer so that they will buy your products and want to return. You’ll want your customers to be in a relaxed and buying mood, so that your retail shop sells items and makes money.
And that’s the power of playing the right retail background music.
It evokes the mood you want, and by sharing music you offer camaraderie and good cheer. The in store music draws customers in, and it keeps them happy to stay longer. It puts them in the right mood and encourages them to open their wallets. But you need the right music and with all things considered, streaming your retail background generally is not the best way.
It may seem that streaming music is a great idea because they don’t really cost that much. But the downsides definitely outweigh this advantage:
- Streaming music eats up a lot of bandwidth. After all, you are downloading and playing music in real time, so the download rate would be very high for that to happen. If you are on a fixed or limited bandwidth plan, streaming music can really inflate your Internet connection costs.
- Another problem with the huge bandwidth use is that all the other business applications you use with the Internet will may suffer as a consequence. They’re all playing second fiddle to the streaming music, and so they have to wait for the computer and bandwidth resources they need. Your social media marketing efforts will have to take a back seat, and even emailing may be slow.
- Bandwidth is also not always reliable, and your download speeds can vary. Streaming music can produce inferior sound quality compared to CD quality music, as it commonly uses special compression formats which degrades the sound quality.
Worse, the unreliable bandwidth can really distort the sound quality of your streaming music even further. Every now and then there will be pauses and hitches in the music, and you’ll find your customers won’t really enjoy such an experience. It may even seem to them that you don’t really care about their enjoyment, and that you are too cheap to actually provide quality and continuous music for your shoppers.
- You should also consider the legality of playing a streaming music service within a commercial business. The terms and conditions for most streaming music suppliers state explicitly that it is only for personal enjoyment. But what you are doing is using the music for commercial purposes. While the chances of actually being prosecuted for this act may be slim, why risk it? Business is already a tough proposition – there’s no good reason to add an additional risk for such measly gains.
So do the right thing and just play music from a localised playback device that may receive new music and updates from the internet but not actually rely on it to stream 24/7. The sound quality should be superior, and your business will benefit by having an internet connection which isn’t compromised by your music service hogging all your valuable internet resources.
