What music suits your restaurant, and what does it cost?

What music suits lunch, dinner and late evening?

Your restaurant is three or four different places in a single day, even with the tables in the same spot. Lunch is short and businesslike, and guests want to be away on time. That calls for music with some pace and a clear sound. The volume is right when you notice the music as you walk in and forget it once you sit down.

At dinner guests stay longer and talk more. The music then steps back, in tempo and in volume. After ten the kitchen closes and the bar takes over. Then it can go lower and slower, with more space between the notes.

Volume follows the room, not the clock. A half-empty room with loud music feels empty. A full room with quiet music feels noisy, because you can hear the next table word for word. The rule of thumb is simple. A conversation at normal speaking level should be possible at every table.

Why do you hear lounge and jazz so often?

Lounge and jazz have two qualities that suit a restaurant. They are usually instrumental, so there are no lyrics competing with the conversation at the table. And they cover a wide range of tempos, from brisk afternoon jazz to slow late-night lounge, without the style jumping about.

The risk lies in the repetition. Your staff hear a fixed four-hour playlist around ten times a week. After a few weeks the waiting staff know every track, and so do your regulars.

If you settle on one genre, you need a lot of tracks.

What does research say about tempo, time at the table and spending?

The best-known study is by Ronald Milliman. In an American restaurant he alternated slow and fast music on Friday and Saturday evenings. With slow music guests stayed at the table for 56 minutes on average, with fast music 45. They did not spend more on food, but they did on drinks (Milliman, 1986).

Style matters too. In a British restaurant, classical music, pop music or no music was played over eighteen evenings. With classical music, spending per head was higher than with pop or with silence (North, Shilcock and Hargreaves, 2003).

Later studies temper the idea of tempo as a lever. Caldwell and Hibbert found that whether guests liked the music explained time at the table better than tempo did (2002). A meta-analysis of 56 studies in hospitality and tourism drew the same lesson. Which music you choose matters more than whether music plays at all. Whether the music is liked and fits the venue weighs more than tempo or volume (Trompeta et al., 2022).

For your restaurant the conclusion is more modest than the stories about it. Music that fits your venue and your guests does more than the right number of beats per minute.

What does a restaurant pay Buma and Sena?

Buma/Stemra and Sena class a restaurant as hospitality, and that is the most expensive category. The amount depends on the floor area where the music can be heard. For 2026 the base tariff up to 100 m² is € 672 at Buma/Stemra and € 1,280 at Sena, around € 1,952 a year together. Up to 200 m² that is around € 2,764 together, up to 300 m² around € 3,606.

Register yourself and pay on time, and you get a discount of up to 33.33%. Up to 100 m² that brings you to around € 1,302 a year. If an inspection finds you playing without a licence, the discount lapses. How that works is on A fine from Buma/Stemra?

A terrace with speakers counts, and a radio in the restaurant counts just as much as a playlist. More on the categories and what counts is on music in hospitality and music on terraces. An ordinary Spotify account is not allowed in a restaurant in any case. See Spotify in hospitality.