BACKGROUND MUSIC FOR WAITING ROOMS
How to have background music in your waiting rooms? The legal & easy way.
How to have background music in your waiting rooms? The legal & easy way.
The waiting room of any place, from a multinational company to a massage center or a hospital, it’s a place where you have to take care of the customer as if it were the most important room in your business.
It is usually the room where the customer has time to think and consider what exactly he or she is doing there.
Depending on whether or not they feel comfortable, they will see your business one way or another and have more or less willing to return other times or even refer you to their friends and acquaintances.
Of course, you have to take good care of the furniture, decoration, and lighting. However, here we will talk about the background music.
The first thing we have to know is that, if we don’t want to pay yearly fees and involve ourselves in bureaucracy it’s always better not to play famous songs in our waiting room.
In the USA, only if it’s music that plays on the radio we will not have any problems.
The radio station has already paid for blanket public performance licenses from the PROs (Performance Rights Organizations, like BMI or ASCAP) and as long as you aren’t charging admission for patrons to listen to it, retransmitting it, or doing a few other prohibited things, you’re allowed to leave the radio or TV on in a small business establishment without paying for a public performance license.
This may seem inconvenient because our customers are familiar with this kind of music, but if dig deeper we see that is not what they want to hear because they are already bored of these songs, hearing them all day long on the radio, Internet, and television.
Thus, we have several options:
The first option is not recommended in any scenario because even in places where silence could blend with the environment, for example in a spa or massage center, they also play relaxing and meditative background music, which helps to quiet the mind of the customer and make them more prone to welfare.
The second option is ideal for those businesses that prefer not to distract the client with television or unwilling to buy one of these devices.
As we discussed, we will not play famous songs, but Royalty-Free music.
We have several marketplaces and options:
Looking ahead to the third option, installing a TV and playing music on, it is a very good choice for the most boring waiting rooms and in which the customer spends more time, such as a dental clinic or a doctor’s office, to keep their mind distracted.