Background music in your company restaurant, without Buma and Sena

What else you get

The whole building comes past In a company restaurant everything happens in two hours a day, and almost nothing for the rest of it. In those two hours the whole building comes past. That is the moment to tell people something, and right now that usually goes on a sheet of paper on the serving counter.

Today's soup between the tracks With RadioMatic it sits inside the station. The DJ moments name your restaurant and announce what is on the soup menu today, that there is a Christmas lunch on Friday or that the salad offer runs until the end of the month. You type it in and you hear it on the next round.

No nagging fixed list The music is generated rather than pulled from a fixed list. In a canteen that matters more than in a shop, because the same audience comes here every day in the same two hours. Your kitchen staff are also there from seven in the morning. For them a list of three hundred tracks has turned into one nagging tune after a month. The style you set stays put, and new music arrives every day, and what suits your business comes back as your own hits.

Short news with weather and traffic On the hour a short news round can follow with the weather and the traffic. You pick which subjects go in. If your canteen empties at half past four, the four o’clock traffic is more useful than the news. Third-party advertising never comes in between. With more locations or more canteens inside the same company, you run them from a single dashboard with its own mood and announcements per site.

Which music works at lunch, and which outside it?

Hard surfaces and loud lunches Acoustically a company restaurant is an awkward space. Hard floor, a lot of glass, long tables and a serving area with trays and cutlery. Between twelve and half past one hundreds of people sit there talking, and then it gets loud by itself. Music then does little for the atmosphere, but a lot for the sound in the room.

Tempo against the din A slightly higher tempo and a clear pulse make the noise less messy and stuttering. Then nobody at the table has to shout across four chairs. If the music is too soft during lunch, that is as uncomfortable as too loud, because then all you hear is cutlery and the till.

Something calmer outside lunch Outside those two hours it is a different space. At half past ten three people sit there with a coffee and a laptop, and at three the cleaning starts. Something calmer fits there, with less dynamics and a lower volume.

The switch happens by itself In practice the switching over is what goes wrong, because nobody behind the serving counter has time at two o’clock to pick another list. With RadioMatic you set it per part of the day and it happens by itself. That goes for the announcements you want played only during lunch as well.

Coffee corner as its own zone A coffee corner or a seating area next to the canteen often asks for something different from the main hall. You put that in as a separate zone with its own mood, from the same dashboard. With several canteens inside the same company, every site can keep its own rhythm and its own announcements.

On the installation already in place

Through the ceiling speakers In nearly every company restaurant there are already ceiling speakers, often on a 100-volt system that is also used for the building announcements. The RadioMatic stream goes into that system through the line-in on the amplifier and the zones you have now stay as they are. If you have Sonos, a Chromecast or a media player behind the counter instead, it plays on that. A browser on a PC or tablet is enough to start.

Announcements keep working If the canteen shares the installation with a building-wide announcement system, that keeps working the way it worked, because the music is simply a source on the input. If you want to run the seating area separately from the hall, you put a separate source there. You hear back within one working day, and after that your station is live in under ten minutes.

What you can choose from today

Suppliers for hospitality and business Look for music for your company restaurant and you end up with suppliers who serve hospitality and businesses in general. Synerplay has a page for music in restaurants and also names offices and sports club canteens. Backsound supplies music computers to hospitality, retail and businesses.

Two licences on top With both of them you are playing music by human creators. That means two extra bills, from Buma/Stemra and from Sena. Synerplay says itself that in the Netherlands you need those two licences, and points to mijnlicentie.nl. Backsound writes in its frequently asked questions that you as the business owner remain responsible for that licence. What that costs is set out above.