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.
Background music for businesses and waiting rooms
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:
- Not to put any music so the waiting room is silent.
- Play licensed background music.
- Install a television with music.
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.
Perfect, where then I get this royalty-free music?
We have several marketplaces and options:
- Soundtrack Your Brand: In our view, the best option in this industry. Soundtrack offers a platform for streaming music, licensed for commercial and public venues. It will allow you to use its more than 300 soundtracks, updated daily with more than 10,000 new songs, remotely and from any device (Android, iOS or Windows). Its cost in the USA and Canada is $34.99 / month per location, but the good thing is that you can try it for a month for free and cancel it at any time.
- Cloud Cover Music: Only for the US and Canada, but if you are located there is probably your best option. This company provides legal streaming music for businesses and offers access to more than 120 stations with songs by well-known artists. For only $17.95 per month (and for each location) you can choose the station based on the type of business, music genre or mood. They also offer a free 14-day trial that you can take advantage of without providing any bank details.
- SoundSuit: This platform has been one of the last to reach the streaming music industry, but that does not mean that it cannot be considered one of the best. In fact, its offer is based on providing its clients with maximum musical simplicity: through a single monthly payment of $29.99 you will have at your disposal a huge music library with all the rights to each of the songs you download, whether for personal or commercial use.
- Mood Media: A solution for big brands, they study your company and locations and offer a combination of unique sounds. They provide you with software and hardware to handle everything from there in the easiest way possible. Primark, The Body Shop, Karl Lagerfield and The North Face are some of their clients.
- Soundreef: Same as Cloud Cover Music, offers a free trial period of 15 days to see if we are convinced. The cost varies with the square footage of your stores.
- Dozmia for Business: You explain how’s your business and they make the perfect playlist for you. The downside is, they don’t explain the monthly cost on their website.
- Melody Pods: They select the music for you and update it every month with new songs, giving you special software to handle the playlist from your smartphone or tablet, wherever you are.
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.
