The Commodity Trap: Why Your Venue Sounds Like Everyone Else’s
When everyone sounds the same, no one gets remembered.
By Ross Woodhams, CEO & Founder, Audalize
Every high street is visually different, yet sonically identical.
Step into any bar, café, or retail space and you’ll encounter the same generic background music: inoffensive, indistinct, forgettable.
This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a system failure. And it’s costing you differentiation, memorability, and ultimately profit.
The Hidden Cost of Mass-Market Background Music
Most venues use mass-market background music (BGM) services. These are built for scale, not distinction. Their goal is to serve the largest number of businesses with the least friction.
In other words: commoditisation.
When you use the same music platform as 10,000 other businesses, your venue becomes indistinct by design. You may think you’re saving time or cost, but the real price is that you’ve surrendered your most emotionally powerful brand lever to a vendor who doesn’t know or care who you are.
And if your customer can’t tell you apart from the venue next door, you’ve already lost.
Differentiation Is Not Optional
In business, there are two viable positions: monopoly or commodity.
A monopoly owns a space. It has a clear identity, a distinct proposition, and pricing power. A commodity competes on convenience and cost, and dies by it.
Most venues have invested heavily in physical differentiation: architecture, menus, design, lighting and even beverage selection. But very few have considered sonic differentiation, despite music being the most persistent and emotionally resonant layer of the customer experience.
The result?
A beautifully designed space that sounds like everywhere else and from a brand standpoint, this is strategic malpractice.
Music Is a Strategic Asset
Music isn’t decoration. It’s infrastructure.
It influences customer mood, perception, dwell time, and spend. And unlike a new bar top or light fitting, it operates continuously. It’s the only part of your brand that runs 100% of your open hours.
To treat it like a background detail is to ignore one of your most powerful tools for shaping behaviour and building loyalty.
The brands that understand this will create experiences that aren’t just visited, they’re remembered.
The Opportunity: Own the Feeling
Every space communicates something, whether intentionally or not. Most mass-market BGM services reduce that communication to neutrality.
But neutrality isn’t a brand. It’s an absence.
The opportunity is to own the feeling in your space. Not just by what people see, but by what they hear and feel the moment they walk in.
Sound is the last great unclaimed territory in hospitality branding.
And right now, it’s being wasted.
So…what’s the point?
If you’ve invested in creating a venue with unique visual and culinary identity, but you’re outsourcing your music to a generic system, then you’ve created a brand with a strategic void at its centre.
The answer isn’t more volume or more tracks. It’s better curation, aligned with intent, behaviour, and emotional impact.
The venues that realise this early will own the future.
The rest will fade into background noise just like their music.
Ross is CEO and Founder of Audalize, the company helping venues sound unforgettable. Learn more at audalize.com.