What Are The Secrets To Getting Music Right In Restaurants & Bars? (Ep 163)
Jaime Oikle of RunningRestaurants.com visits with Ola Sars, the founder and CEO of Soundtrack Your Brand, in this fun episode about how aspects of music at a restaurant or bar can be a powerful differentiating factor. Ola has a long and storied past in the music business, so it was great to get his insights on what can work well for restaurants and bars. Check it out!
Find out more at Soundtrack Your Brand.
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What Are The Secrets To Getting Music Right In Restaurants & Bars With Ola Sars
We have a great episode for you with Ola Sars, founder and CEO of Soundtrack Your Brand. Ola, welcome, nice to meet you.
Thank you. Nice to meet you, guys.
Very different episode today. Joining us on Bring Your Child to Work Day is my third-grade daughter, Morgan. Say hi, Morgan.
Hi.
This is a great episode for Morgan to be involved with because she is into music. We go driving and she says, “Give me your phone,” and she picks the song. What do you like about music?
I like how the beats of the music are catchy, and I like to dance and sing to the music. I love listening to music.
What's fascinating is the kids are much better. They know the names, the artists, and the songs. They pull them out of the air. I'm like, “How did you pick that?” They just pick the songs. They're in tune with it. We're going to have Morgan head out in a minute. We go out to eat a lot, where we play softball. We're a busy family with three kids. We eat out a lot. What do you notice about music at restaurants that we go to?
It's very loud and you can notice it very easily. Also, the music there is catchy and that type of stuff. It's not classical music. It's just a regular full-on music.
Do you notice it’s different in different types of restaurants?
Yeah.
That's going to be fun to talk about. Thank you for joining us. We're going to put you to work a little bit later here in the office.
Morgan, let me ask you a question here from Stockholm. What do you do when you're in a restaurant, a dad, a mom, and your siblings, and the music is bad?
I don't have too much of a bad side of music. I listen to whatever is on.
I love it. She's very flexible. Usually, people leave the restaurant if the music is bad. That's when you get older. You’re more grumpy. They need that.
The kids go outside and they play or something like that. All right, I'm going to let you fly. Thank you for joining us and we're going to dig in.
Bye, Morgan.
Bye.
The Importance Of Music In Restaurants
I appreciate you indulging us there. Let's dig in. We go out to eat a lot and I've always been fascinated by the restaurant music aspect of it. I think it's a lot different now. I used to see, and maybe you still do. You see the little cabinet that has all the receivers, buttons, switches, and lights. That's probably a big part of it with streaming now. You’re able to pick up any song from anywhere and license this. Tell me what music should look like in restaurants. What do you think?
It depends on the restaurant. The whole thing is that with streaming technology, I come from the consumer side and I started Soundtrack with a very simple ambition to bring the power of music to entrepreneurs, and restaurant entrepreneurs are always right in the middle of that because music is such a central part of the experience. The first question is like with any type of brand or if you're building a business. You're thinking about what's your brand about and what type of customer experience you want to deliver. There's no right and wrong in terms of music.
It's right and wrong in terms of what experience you want to deliver. If you're running a crossover Asian kitchen that's pretty fancy in Miami, that's probably sounding completely different than you and me running a burger joint in Stockholm. It's back to the entrepreneur and what type of brand experience they want to deliver. That brand experience is then translated into the soundtrack or the music. Hence, it will sound different depending on what type of business and what type of customer experience you're trying to deliver.
Music in restaurants is about brand experience. There’s no right or wrong music; it's just what fits the vibe you want to create.
What does the tech look like right now maybe for your stuff specifically? Is it I'm a restaurant owner and I can go in and pick a playlist that has a vibe? I pick the 50 songs that I like the most, and they rotate. What are some of the options?
First of all, we've all been trained by Apple, Spotify, and Amazon as consumers. We’re streaming being. There's this completely new notion that you can access all the music in the world at your fingertips. You then go and you run your restaurant, and there's no option because there hasn't been a streaming option. Using Spotify, Amazon, or Apple is illegal. It's the same IP violation as using a Netflix account to open a cinema, or if you're running a sports bar, you know you have to pay for the business license. You can't just go and use your Fox account and show the MMA fight or the NBA game. You have to get a business license, first of all.
That's the first legal prerequisite or technology enablement and legal enablement. Once you get a legal service in there, for example, Soundtrack, Soundtrack.app, or SoundtrackYourBrand.com, you download that. All of a sudden, you're faced with the challenge of delivering the right music at the right place at the right time. You might have ten restaurants or you might have one restaurant. You have to start with that exercise in terms of what's my brand about, what my customer experience is about, and what that sounds like.
Customizing Music For Your Restaurant Brand
Answering your question, there are multiple options with our service. First, if you're a restaurant in Miami and you're coming in, then we will see that you're a restaurant coming in, signing up, and you're in Miami. We will start recommending playlists that are adapted to restaurants that we think would fit your style. They might not be right. The machines providing those might not be 100% spot on, but that's the first simplified option. You might choose a cool restaurant playlist called Hip Restaurants in Miami, for example, that we've already pre-curated for you.
Flexibility In Music Scheduling
If you want to lean forward a little bit more and start customizing your experience, then the second level of customization is you're creating a soundtrack or a playlist based on our algorithms or our AI, as it's called. That use case could be you can start feeding us with brand prerequisites or brand values. You can say, “I want to have house music, electronic music, and lounge music from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s that are elegant but progressive and do not include explicit lyrics and it should be medium to high tempo.” That's an actual use case with our service.
Our 250 machines start feeding you. Machines means machine learning. The computers start working to filter music for you based on those filters. It recommends a soundtrack for you that sounds according to those inputs. You listen to that and if that's fine, you launch it and you go sell drinks and food, and do whatever you do. It can keep going. You shut down your restaurant in twenty years, and it will keep updating based on those prerequisites.
That’s trying to help the entrepreneur save time, anxiety, and money because it costs a lot of money to have people curating for you and DJs coming in and so forth. If that's not enough for you, if you want to be more leaning forward, you can also start building your own playlist, picking the tracks, and doing what you do on a consumer service. Let's say you and I are running this restaurant. I sit one night and put together 20 or 30 tracks on Spotify. I can do it on Spotify. I then import that playlist into Soundtrack one-to-one, and it's legalized for business use. We license all of that music directly in real-time for us.
We then have maybe our lunch playlist. Maybe that's 100 tracks that I put together, then you sat at home and you did the dinner playlist as well on Apple Music, for example, and you import that. We start putting together our work week. We have scheduling software where you do a music schedule. You can put playlists into different time slots, depending on how you're running your business, what customers are in there, and what type of experience you want to deliver over the work week.
We offer the simplest use case, picking a ready-made soundtrack or a playlist, all the way to customizing every little experience through the whole work week exactly on the track that you want to play if that's what you want to do. On top of that, you can control all your restaurants. If you and I had twenty restaurants, we could control them from one control interface. We would sit in Orlando and control restaurants all over the US from one interface. We can decide what's playing in Boston, Miami, San Francisco, LA, Stockholm, Munich, and Barcelona in real time from one instance.
The flexibility there is incredible. I think the ability to be basic and pick a playlist, that's a good start. I like that second one where you were given a whole bunch of criteria and letting it then spit out the songs. I think that's neat. If somebody wants to get granular and they want to have certain songs in there, pick it and so forth. I know people do have that option as well. Back to the apps, is it also thumbs up, thumbs down, and like? Will your algorithm take into account that feedback?
Yes. You can trim it over time. You can do whatever you like to train the machines. You can even open up for customer feedback if that's something that you want to do. That's an option on our API. I think my learning, and I've never been a restaurant entrepreneur. I've been working in restaurants throughout my life, but I've never been a real entrepreneur. Learning about restaurant entrepreneurs has been amazing because they are so precise. They're so good at figuring out what type of experience they want to deliver. They're so forward-leaning.
I didn't think so when I started this company. I started learning about music and business. The restaurant entrepreneurs are the most sophisticated music curators, and they know what they want. You can see these restaurant entrepreneurs around the world putting together the perfect week. They prepare and launch it, and they fine-tune it the whole time. Maybe there's an event on Thursday, and then they have to quickly change for that event because they want to have a specific theme.
Restaurant entrepreneurs are sophisticated music curators, crafting perfect weekly soundtracks to enhance the customer experience.
What I've also learned is it takes so much time to do this. Just saving time for entrepreneurs is probably our most important proposition because they have so much else to do. Planning staff, everything, the whole week. If we can save them 5 or 10 hours a week, then I'm happy with the service that we provide them.
Restaurateurs wear so many hats. It's an incredible job. One thing that you brought up with Morgan even earlier was the volume. What feedback do you give restaurants and bars about volume? It's a delicate balance of wanting to be in the soundtrack but also not being above the conversation. What thoughts do you share?
The Importance Of Proper Audio Setup
All the aspects of delivering a music experience are important because it's one of those typical things that I could say, and I've talked to probably thousands of entrepreneurs now just learning about it. It's as simple as if you don't want to do it correctly and you want to do it properly, don't do it at all. Not everyone is as forgiving as Morgan is. A lot of people are not. How many times have we walked into a restaurant, and the sound is terrible? It's bouncing, it's too high, and it's this. It's like, “I can't believe this great restaurant isn't paying attention to this.” I'm a little bit disturbed because I'm working with it, and I'm always listening.
To answer your question, volume is a very important component. You need a professional audio setup in terms of setting up speakers and acoustics. It's worth it to bring in a local audio dealer to set it up because it ruins the whole experience if it's terrible. If you've spent a million dollars to create this amazing restaurant with the design, chairs, staff, and everything, then all of a sudden, the music is terrible and it's bouncing on the walls, it's all destroyed in my opinion. Audio and acoustic setup are very important, but most importantly together is choosing the right music at the right time.
You've mentioned Spotify, and I saw on your LinkedIn profile a reference to Spotify business, a reference to Beats. Talk about your background in music.
I've been doing this for a while. This is my fourth music startup. I've been involved in a bunch of startups before, including Beats Music where I was a co-founder, and we sold to Apple. I moved home back to Sweden, where I'm from, and started Spotify business together with Spotify, which was the business arm of Spotify. I pivoted out of that and moved into becoming a completely independent company because it needed to be. It's so different than the consumer services. You're trying to build a truck inside a car company.
It's so different from business to business. I realized that the product was so different. The licensing wasn't done. There were no licensing deals for actual public performance and being able to stream in business, then a different type of team and different type of go-to-market, meaning selling. Everything was different. I moved away from home, so to speak. In 2018, we launched Soundtrack as an independent, and then we've been rolling out in 75 markets.
That's amazing. I imagine the time with Beats and going through the expansion, that took off like crazy. I think when Apple bought that, everybody was shocked by that. Talk about that little moment. No one probably ever saw that coming.
You're right. It was extremely challenging. I would have given it a 50-50 chance of surviving because it was a crazy time, and it came from out of nowhere. There was a lot of logic behind it. It's a long story. It may be a book one day. I've been at the forefront of this industry for a while now and the whole transition from CDs to streaming. Four companies later, I'm still trying to figure it out.
Don't hate on me. I happen to have the Bose on today, but I know Beats continues to do terrific. Music is a big part of restaurants, 100%. For folks that want to learn more about you guys, what you do, and where you do it, is it best to go to the website? Are you guys big on social? Where should they go?
Trying Out Soundtrack Your Brand
They should go to SoundTrack.app or SoundTrackYourBrand.com. Soundtrack.app is the easiest URL because that's where you go and download the app. There are a bunch of recommendations on how to curate for a restaurant. There are tutorials. There's editorial material and what you should be thinking about. I would recommend to go in and use the product. That's always the easiest way to learn. It's a free trial. You can try it for two weeks without paying anything. You don't even have to give us your credit card. We'll invite you in. You can start soundtracking your brand and your experience.
You can use our algorithms which are specifically developed for businesses. You can look at what we got in terms of those ready-made playlists that I told you about. There might be some stuff there that's bang on what you want. We put a lot of love into those. If you want to start curating yourself and creating your music schedule for your business, you can try all of them. You can go and do a test drive and see if you like the car, so to speak. You would probably learn something from there as well.
I'll have to go dig into the site as well. The fact that you would educate folks there as well and have some tips that are very helpful. Go try it out. A test drive before you buy is always good advice. I mentioned in the beginning part that I've always been fascinated by the music side. I appreciate you jumping on today and talking about it. Folks, this has been Ola Sars, founder and CEO of Soundtrack Your Brand. Make sure to check them out at SoundtrackYourBrand.com. What's the app, the shorter one as well?
Using the right music can increase restaurant sales by 9%! People stay longer, buy more drinks, and enjoy more desserts.
Soundtrack.app. The last thing I want to say is we did some research with a big restaurant chain the other year. We were able to prove a 9% sales increase by applying the right music at the right place at the right time because people stayed longer and bought more drinks, desserts, and stuff. I'm not saying everyone can do it, but we did it with academic researchers, and on a statistical base, that was very robust. It was incredible. Nine percent top line at doing it right. I think everyone should pay more attention to it than they're doing today.
If we were live, we would look out at the audience and say, “Who would like a 9% increase in their sales?” Everyone would raise their hands. That is a statistically significant number. I appreciate that. Folks, tune in for more great restaurant marketing operations, service people, and tech tips. Stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Ola.
Thank you.
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